Nightmare Angel
by Nookienostradamus
Summary: "Crash" (JG Ballard, 1976) AU: Sam Winchester is driving his girlfriend's car on Interstate 80 to Reno when his entire world crumbles. Sam wakes battered and broken in a hospital and so begins an erotic, dreamlike journey into a world where flesh and machine merge, twining and falling toward a final collision. Multiple pairings: Sam/Dean, Dean/Cas, Sam/Meg, Sam/Cas.
1. Chapter 1

Jess had been staring out the window, silent, for two hours. After tracing her profile six, seven, eight times against the evening sky, Sam had stopped looking. Inside, if he was honest with himself, he knew that she would never again look as beautiful as when she had with the low sun caught in her curls, its warmth pushing her toward him. Now the sun was close to setting, red against the toothy hills of the desert.

He could no more draw out that one moment than he could prevent the soft decline of their relationship. Sam couldn't pinpoint the moment that Jess knew it was going to end, but he remembered exactly when _he_ did. It was the day he dropped out of Stanford.

Hell, it might as well have been the day he arrived on campus.

Jessica was from a different world entirely. Her parents were those country-club types, the kinds who owned pastel golf wear and kept a wine cellar. They drove down from their Bayview townhome one weekend a month to shower Jess with decor items for her dorm room, and provide her with a new case of Napa Valley chardonnay or pinot gris. To favor Sam with polite words and stilted smiles that said they were certain he was just another mode of rebellion for their daughter.

Between the two of them, the wine was gone within a week after each visit. Sam always held his liquor well, but Jess would get hammered every night. Ask Sam to fuck her. She refused to call it anything other than "fucking." It made Sam uncomfortable, before the pleasant forgetfulness of the buzz took over. But she was beautiful-so _goddamn_ beautiful-and when Sam said he loved her, she said it back. When the wine dried up, both were uncomfortable for a while, hanging on the hope of the next binge.

He lost interest in engineering long before he would ever lose interest in Jess, though the death of one meant the death of the other, by and by. That dying would be easy.

On the day that he quit, Sam was less afraid of disappointing Jess than he was about giving any retroactive satisfaction to his father.

To say his dad, John, was working class was perhaps to make an understatement of the situation. John Winchester was a small man pinned to small ideals. He hadn't always been that way, but it was getting harder and harder for Sam to remember anything else. From the charred shell of the two-story home where his wife-Sam's mother-died burning along with the faulty space heater that caused the fire, John took his only son to a tiny one-bedroom apartment...and just kept downsizing.

His health faded, dropping onto the convex glass at the bottom of whiskey bottles. He left the apartment on long deer-hunting trips, sometimes leaving everything but his gun in the coat closet. Sam was half-afraid and half-hopeful he'd freeze to death.

John's concern for his son faded, at least until Sam had announced his intention to study engineering at Stanford on scholarship. Then his dad had badgered him, knocked hard at the edifice of what Sam would only come to find out later was an entirely misplaced dream, until Sam packed a bag and drove the beat-up Ford Explorer he'd bought in high school from Lawrence, Kansas to Elko, Nevada. That's where the car finally gave up the ghost. He took a bus the rest of the way into Stanford and snagged a job as a line cook until the semester started.

Just before Thanksgiving that year, he'd met Jess.

Now she sat untouched and unapproachable in the passenger seat of her own Audi RS 5, riding away from a melting sunset toward Reno. Hoping, perhaps as Sam did, to recover what he feared was already sunk like a water-filled buoy off the north shore of Lake Tahoe.

"Are you hungry?"

Jess looked over at him like he was speaking Ancient Etruscan. He felt pathetic for craving that look, anyway.

"It's dark already," Sam said. "I could use something to eat. I say we hole up in Reno for the night and make the trip down tomorrow."

There it was at last. A smile, like a weary blessing. Sam wondered offhand if he got a couple of beers in her whether she'd beg him to take her again, like old times. He was disgusted with himself for thinking it.

"Sure," Jess said. "No matter what, I want one of those drinks tomorrow. The ones with the weird names. Wet Willy." Her laugh was like raindrops.

"Wet Woody," Sam said, cracking a grin.

"That's not any better," said Jess.

In the on-off flicker of the streetlights above I-80 within the city limits showed Jess looking over at him, under the fringe of her lashes like she had at the idiotic fraternity White Party where they'd met. To Sam's credit, and hers, they'd left the blacklit dance floor and spent most of the night talking on a ratty couch on the front porch. The brother in charge of the cheap stereo system had played Steve Miller Band's _The Joker_ seven times. Neither of them had noticed.

Jess just kept looking at him through those long, long lashes-blonde at the tips and almost dancing in the rotating colored lights from the doorway-and at that moment nothing mattered. Here under the stuttering lights on Interstate 80, just past the Reno city limit, it was as if no time had passed at all. He couldn't keep from staring at her.

"Sam-"

The last thing she said was his name.

Her eyes went wide, washed out in the streetlight-no, it wasn't a streetlight. A headlight.

Then the whole world was crumpled and tossed like paper. Jess didn't make a sound beside him, but the curtain airbag deployed just a second sooner than the glove box. The dual impacts turned Jess's chin away from him for the final time. Then Sam felt his nose break as his own airbag fled toward him like a fist. It rasped against his face, burning his lips raw, and sank from view. He heard rather than felt both of his tibias snap.

The whole world was a field of burning stars.

Then nothing, only for a second or two. The smell of rubber laid out, fluids and sheared metal woke him. Jess was slumped in her seat beside him. The dash was a foot nearer to her chest, which was powdered in a corona of white dust. There were stars in her hair, bits of the annihilated windshield.

It took Sam only a moment, even through the red haze crawling up and over his eyes from his shattered face, to realize that Jess's side had taken most of the impact. The Audi lay skewed, accordioned like a blossom of metal facing the opposite shoulder. Jess wouldn't be able to open her door.

Sam shouldered his own door open, and it thumped to the concrete, attached by a single hinge. On the blacktop, his legs swung and wobbled, useless. The pain had not set in yet. He looked into the sudden silence and blackness of the desert night.

Over the gentle grade of the highway, by the guardrail, a dark-haired woman raised her head. After the axle had snapped, her side of the car had dug a deep groove in the pavement and the scar bristled with the afterburn of sparks. The woman opened her eyes, and Sam knew she saw him. Her long, dark hair was teased into an electric cloud around her heart-shaped face.

Sam saw a tremor pass from shoulder to finger as she made to raise her useless hand. Then a stream of blood burst from her nose and leapt off the lapels of her suit jacket to litter the concrete. The drops were the brightest ruby red Sam had ever seen.

A hot wind rolling over the dunes pushed him forward, and Sam saw his own wild-haired shadow on the blacktop. When he looked back toward the car, both it and Jess were in flames.

Sam opened his mouth to scream. The heat pushed the noise back down his throat and closed that throat with a fierce hand. He had ten seconds to watch Jess's motionless form blacken as the halo enclosed her. Then his world went black as well.

A white mountain rose in his view. Sam's entire field of vision was crisscrossed with light, cold and warm beams woven through each other.

The fluorescent panel above was sliced by the rings of a privacy curtain. Slats of late-afternoon sun fanned out across the bedcovers.

The mountain was his nose, bulked by bandages and taped down below his eyes so he could feel every blink. The scraping sea-noise was his breath. Both legs from the knee down were encased in heavy plaster, and the toes that emerged above the padded terminus of each cast had a purplish hue.

It hurt to breathe, and the pain rose sharp in his throat and fell into a spiky tightness around his chest, as though his lungs were filling bit by bit with sparks. Sam saw them spill out above his head with each exhale. He tried to form his lips around Jess's name, but the corner of his mouth split and trickled blood into the day's growth of beard on his chin.

Something over his left shoulder began to click and beep. Salt-heavy, dehydrated tears stung as they fell.

The brusque nurse had asked whether there was anyone she could call. She had a dry-erase slate and marker in her hand. Sam shook his head, waving the slate away. No words necessary for that. Jess was...Jess was gone. And he'd re-break each of his legs in turn rather than have anyone call John Winchester.

The nurse had just nodded and turned away. No follow-up questions, no concerned hands on the forehead. It wasn't like in the movies, and for that Sam was glad. The hospital was a machine, and not one especially disposed to lavish attention on a torn-up stranger with no ID and no insurance.

It was just as well. In the week or so after he regained consciousness, Sam had already cultivated an appreciation for the cool functionality of his surroundings.

He was not really one given to sentiment-not after nearly twenty years of "nut up or shut up" from his father-so the raw grief over Jess blindsided him. During those first days he would weep for solid minutes before even realizing he was crying. He would fill the gauze plugs in his nostrils with bloody snot until it leaked onto his lip. The foul fluid ran down his throat, too. The taste was awful, salt and iron, but swallowing was agony for a throat scrubbed raw by fire, so every two minutes he had to decide between holding the coppery slickness in his mouth a little longer or giving in to torment.

But any of it was better than having his cool, white cocoon of a room invaded. None of the nurses who changed the gauze or the bedpan, brushed powder through his hair or sponged the rank sweat from his skin offered pitying looks or sympathetic words. Still, their organic presence still felt disruptive. Alone amid the whirr of machines, the click and beep, Sam could imagine a symbiosis with the breathing mass of metal, plastic, and glass. If he lay very still, he could feel the tubes that fed him fluids extending tentative roots into his veins and, finding no resistance, wrapping them and filling them. The casts that wrapped his legs hid from sight the minuscule incursion of the titanium pins and screws into his bones, the quiet filling of spaces.

Listening to dirt-daubers kamikaze against the window next to him-the catastrophic crush of exoskeletons reduced to soft, sighing pops-he could picture himself sinking into the mattress, becoming dim and unnoticed. Gone like breath when the sheets were stripped away and ready to embrace the next broken body feeding its blood and tears to the bed.

When he was able to speak again, Sam cried anew for the death of that dream.


	2. Chapter 2

"Maybe a notebook and a pencil?"

It was the first time Sam had given an affirmative, much less spoken aloud, so the nurse was already turning away. She made her nod in profile, striped and unearthly in the early sun, and retreated into different light to complete the turn.

Sam's voice still was not his own. It was scoured and harsh, rumbling up from some cavity that had been gouged out of him by the rupture and realignment of his body. At first, Sam had believed the unfamiliar hollowness to be loss, but as he came back to himself-his voice and his limbs-there were shiftless echoes sounding in parts of him he had never given a second thought. It wasn't as it he was truly coming back to the person he had been before the accident. The tiles of the puzzle had shifted, leaving him stolid and immobile in some parts and curiously empty in others. Creating a new picture. Sam would spend hours now flexing a single muscle at a time: raising a finger or tensing his calf, testing the resilience and resistance from the new occupants of his bones.

In certain places he felt the not-unpleasant invasion of pins, braces, and plates. At the same time, Sam felt as if in other points on his body new orifices had opened and were sipping the air, or were broadening inside him like an inflating balloon. Unfilled. Hungry and strange.

Often, he closed his eyes and imagined the meat of his palm dissolving, leaving only dry bone and an overwrap of skin that fluttered with his breath. He willed his palm translucent to the slatted daylight inside his mind. At other times he could swear he felt the questing of a lipless mouth just below his knee, within the sweat-shriveled padding of the cast. The bud of a tongue, pushing up to taste the surrounding skin and biding time for freedom.

The thoughts were horrifying, and at the same time they drew his mind back again and again. So he asked for the notebook and pencil. He'd been handy once at diagramming, mapping the combination of stark corners and sinuous curves in electrical layouts. Arcs and gradations, strict lines. Weren't bodies just intersections of the former, made more perfect by the latter?

Sam's fingertips itched.

The nurse came back ten minutes later holding a spiral-bound, college-ruled notebook. One of the cheap ones with the holes incompletely punched through the pages so circular tags of paper hung like superfluous skin.

"Thanks," he said.

"Thank me in a minute," said the nurse. "Before I give it to you, we're going to get up and use the bathroom." She gestured to the folded wheelchair in the corner. Sam had not registered its significance or even its presence before that moment.

Even a couple of days ago he would have panicked at the thought of leaving the cocoon of the bed. Now, somehow, his limbs had gained a lightness, though he was sure most of it was imaginary, drawing on his unsettled fantasies about new caverns opening in tendon-strung vaults inside him.

He nodded.

Moving was more difficult but hurt much less than Sam anticipated. Embarrassment gripped him for a moment at the smell that billowed out of his hospital gown-chokingly masculine. It smelled of more than unwashed, sedentary body. Rising from an epicenter in his naked groin, it was the animal reek of strong arousal, but an unfamiliar one. Like sticking his nose in another man's crotch. Far from horrified, Sam had to rely on the pain of his cast-bound leg thumping onto the wheelchair's footrest to wither his sudden erection.

For the first time since the accident he considered the idea that it wasn't only his body that had been rearranged. That the thought hadn't occurred to him before now was shocking.

"You're taller than you look in that bed," the nurse said. "Tell you what, you're lucky that car didn't flip."

It wasn't a consideration Sam had given any thought, but come to think of it the top of his head had been about a half-inch from the roof of the Audi, even with its low-slung seats. He thought about saying, I don't feel lucky, but the sentiment rang false. He had not thought about Jess even once today.

Of course the mirror brought it back. He flinched-not at the strange face it reflected back at him, but at the glass itself, a smooth threat. No, the face that came at him, made gaunt by a slight concavity in the cheap mirror, offered the first glimmer of _self_ Sam had seen since childhood. His breath caught once again in his blistered throat.

His face was a constellation.

All along the left side, beginning at his hairline and extending downward to disappear into the thick growth of beard that had cropped up on his cheeks, lay a scattershot of tiny wounds, brown with old blood. They would fade into the pink of scar tissue, but they would never fade entirely. He raised his hand, ran fingertips over the knotted flesh. Some of the marks that had lost their scabs were still raised, painful to the touch as a pinprick.

"You probably still have glass in there," the nurse said. "I know the docs pried some of the shards out while you were in surgery, but let's face it: it wasn't their first priority."

Sam pressed his finger again to a raised welt just below his eyebrow, one of the gifts from the imploding windshield. The pain of the glass twisting inward brightened his vision so the fluorescent panel above wavered and pulsed. All at once he was desperate to clear away the scruff, to free the wounds hiding below its sylvan cover.

"Can I shave?"

"Pee first," the nurse said.

Sam finally left the room's tiny bathroom an hour later, abandoning a froth of cheap shaving foam and whiskers in the basin. The nurse, losing her patience, had applied plastic bandages over the places where the equally cheap razor had torn open Sam's star-wounds. He had bled, and winced, and pressed on just as hard. Looking for a sparkle too embedded to be dug out with a crude blade.

His minder had been less than reluctant to allow him a little time in the green linoleum hallway, dragging his IV pole and trying at the same time to inch the wheelchair forward. With the extra inches of plaster on his feet, he felt like his knees were pulled up to his chin.

It was because of the effort of trying to drag an uncooperative right leg that the dark-haired woman did not see him until after she had rounded the corner. A whip-thin and flat-topped nurse steadied her with a hand on her back as she pushed the walker.

Sam was certain that it was the woman from the other car even before she raised her head. Her eyes went wide, then narrow, projecting malice. Only the tilt of her chin softened the effect, made her seem more curious than angry. Her lips parted, just as they had in the mangled car, as though she wanted to speak. Unlike Sam's own, her lips were not dry, but glistened with a thick ointment that made their natural redness insistent. The slot of her open mouth below a row of small, white teeth was burgundy-black.

Sam's mouth began to water.

Then a rough jerk on the handles of his chair broke the moment. When he looked back, the woman had turned her head, her profile disappearing behind the dark curtain of her hair.

"Who's that?" Sam asked, though he knew.

"Dr. Masters," said the nurse.

"Doctor?"

"She teaches at UN Reno. Her husband was killed in a car accident."

A diplomatic response, Sam thought. "It was my accident. I killed her husband," he said.

The nurse swiveled the chair so quickly Sam almost lost his grip on the IV pole. "Let's get you back to bed," she said.

That night, settled over stiff new sheets, Sam dreamed that Dr. Masters came to his room. She walked with a cane rather than the walker, and her hair swayed with her limp. Sam could hear the breath in and out of her shining mouth. Her face was flushed with the exertion of walking, her eyes bright and intent. Her uneven, rolling stride was the most erotic thing Sam could remember seeing in his life.

"What's your name?" dream-Sam asked. "Your first name."

The woman didn't answer. She came to his bedside instead, and laid the cane across his plaster-wrapped shins. They throbbed with the memory of breaking, itchy and hot inside their casts. Above his sweating thighs his cock pulsed, too.

He had not noticed before that the cane she laid in his lap was not the standard-issue hospital aluminum, but a dark wood with an almost invisible grain. The finial was a stamped pewter eight-ball.

In the dream, Sam stared at the cane so intently it took him a moment to realize that Dr. Masters had slid a bandaged hand under his hospital gown, enfolding his erection in a cradle of rough gauze. The contact made him gasp.

"I'm not the same," Masters said as she began to stroke. The burning rasp of the bandages melted into a pleasant smoothness as they fell away, tickling his thighs with moth-flutters.

"I'm not the same," Sam echoed.

Masters looked at him, tilting her chin just as she had in the hallway. The wound in her palm opened against his skin, bloodless but still slick. He could feel its edges moving, wrapping his cock, straining, greedy.

Sam came hard, waking to an empty room as he did.


	3. Chapter 3

If a flood of unprecedented want had been loosed by the crash into Sam's body, a parallel tide of invention poured from his mind to his fingers. Neither inundation was discrete; they knitted and twined within him in the same way that the struts and screws settled into and were wrapped by his soft tissues: in an elated, hallucinogenic rush.

Sam filled the single notebook in a matter of days, ground the pencil to a nub and asked for another of each. Its innocuous cover, dented with sweaty fingerprints in the fervency of creation, hid a menagerie of half-creatures. Anatomical sketches that were themselves again halved by inorganic incursion. Medical, vehicular:

_The chrome rails of an unoccupied hospital bed swelled and diverged, becoming flesh until they terminated in two hands crossed in contemplation over the sheets._

_A catheter lent radial superstructure to an erect, transected penis, the spokes growing in number and spiraling into triple and quadruple helices toward the testes._

_The gear shift of a car terminated in a metallic claw that gripped the fingers of a human hand with beautiful, breaking strength._

_An emerging airbag, shot through with capillaries that led to a lush and otherwise faceless mouth, bore down between a woman's thighs, its dripping tongue hurtling toward her vulva with impaling speed._

Sam could no more easily explain the drawings than he could his increasing preoccupation with Dr. Masters. In the new voice he was coming to think of as his own, he would ask to take the wheelchair out into the hallway again and again. There he sat, sketchpad in his lap, caught between enraptured scribbling and waiting for another glimpse of the professor in the room down the hall.

For many days there was no sign of her, leaving Sam paralyzed with fear that she had taken a turn for the worse. During that time, Dr. Masters almost never failed to appear in his dreams. These visions were tinted with every experience from the tender to the terrifying, all underlain with the same discomfiting eroticism that marked the first dream. Sometimes Masters would sit by his bedside and stroke the lank hair away from his forehead, arranging her fingertips in slow and shifting configurations over the scars on his face. Her touch made the glass shards embedded beneath vibrate, nestling deeper into his tissue as though they had a rudimentary agency of their own.

At other times she would stretch out beside him, draped half over him in the narrow bed, and run her hands over his body. His healing scars and bruises would receive the same insistent and clinical attention as his orifices. Masters would probe his mouth, stroking his palate and the inside of his cheeks as Sam tasted salt and strangeness underneath her false nails. She would trace the suture-bound rent in the flesh of his leg that peeked just above the crest of the cast, and follow its line as far as she could inside the humid plaster, turning tickling pleasure to pain. Or she might settle his balls in her palm as though weighing them, and press a fingertip inside him, leaving it unmoving and Sam's cock untouched and hopelessly hard.

It was during only one dream, as Dr. Masters lay beside him, that her touches were anything but superficial. As she lay beside him, her solid weight abated and she begin to disincorporate and grow fuzzy around the edges. The curves of her form-the dimples in her elbows and the persistent roundness of her airbag-kissed breasts-undulated and grew faint, and Sam felt her fingers underneath his rib cage, stroking his galloping heart against its own rhythm, as if it were a sexual organ.

The passing nurses were used to Sam's sojourns out into the hallway, skirting him as though they would a piece of furniture. Often he felt like one, failing to do as he was asked and stretch or flex his cast-bound legs once every half-hour. With eyes alternately straining to conjure Dr. Masters out of the white stretch of the hallway or new grotesqueries out of the white expanse of notepaper, the lower half of his body would go numb, unnoticed.

On the night that he was left in the hall, Sam was already sure he could wheel back into the room on his own and hoist himself back into the bed. His arms were gaining strength every day, and they jumped and shuddered as he lay, preparing to compensate for the gradual atrophy of his legs within their confinement.

He didn't even have to contend with the IV anymore. A few days prior, an attendant had slid the needle from his vein slick and stained. The bead of bloody saline quivered at its invasive tip, then flew away to land cold on Sam's forearm. After the nurse had given her perfunctory smile and slipped through the curtain like an unheralded theatrical extra, Sam had licked the drop from his own skin.

Being left to his own devices, passed by like a mere fixture, was his preferred state of being. In any case, he felt as if he had been melting into disinfectant-scented surfaces of the hospital-all gleaming without exception-leaving parts of himself with the acceptance of dissolution in the walls, the curtains, the rails and tiles and tubes. But still able to watch.

It was on that same night that Sam saw a man enter Dr. Masters' room. He wore a white coat and carried a manila file folder stuffed with papers, but Sam was certain in that moment that he wasn't a doctor. The jeans he wore below the coat (the fact that he wore jeans at all) were frayed at the cuffs and stained with dark smears of grease like machine lubricant or motor oil. Sam could only see his profile and his close-cropped hair in the seconds before he disappeared through the doorway, but he noticed that the man walked with a slight limp, as though one leg were slightly shorter than the other.

His rolling gait reminded Sam of the way Dr. Masters had first entered his dream-room, and the association made his fingers contract around the arms of his chair. Instead of heat, the welcome advent of arousal was a cold clench around his sacrum, sending pins and needles rolling down his immobilized thighs in waves.

It could have been minutes or hours that Sam stared at the obscured doorway, unable to hear anything over the metronomic beeps and the press of breathing machines. He held his own breath until it burned in his lungs, imagining the man in the white coat bent over Masters' bed, perhaps touching her, perhaps not. Sam visualized the man brushing aside her dark hair to whisper close to her cheek. Nothing hurried, all languid. And he felt gripped with a jealousy more paralytic than any cast, yet unable to decide which he envied more: the speaker or the spoken to.

When the man emerged again from Dr. Masters' room, Sam had soaked a handprint into the page of his notebook, warping further the half-formed image of a man with a steering column emerging from his chest-not impaled on it but growing it from a font of his own skin.

This time, lit from above by the green fluorescent panel, the man turned to look at him. Seen full-on, he was beauty interrupted. The composition of his face was conventionally lovely, but through the sharpened shadows that divided the man's face, Sam saw that it was further divided. A patch of darker skin-perhaps a graft?-stretched amoebic fingers from just below his hairline to just above his left eyebrow. Bisecting that heavy eyebrow and trailing across his eyelid to curve over his cheek was a line of scar tissue like a shining seam. The eyeball itself was unaffected, but the thickened tissue caused the lid to bow a little. A sleepy, insouciant wink.

The man in the white doctor's coat and stained jeans lifted the corner of his mouth opposite the drowsy eyelid, signaling to Sam that he had been seen. Then he turned and walked away.

It was the fact that Sam drifted in and out of sleep for the remainder of the night that made him doubt that Dr. Masters actually stood at his bedside in the flesh the next morning. Instead of the hospital gown, she wore a burgundy shawl-collared sweater and black slacks. By mid-morning it would be far too hot to be comfortable in the outfit, but perhaps she thought ahead to protect a form withered by idleness.

She was looking at him with the same chin-tilting curiosity as she had in the hall several days before. Her face was otherwise blank, drained of its former resentment.

"I felt like I had to see you," she said, looking away from him and directly into the sunlight that had begun to reach between the shining white industrial blinds. "Is that strange?"

Sam had no answer.

Masters looked down again, not at Sam's face but at the notebook open in his lap. Her heart-shaped face registered no reaction to the sketches, and by the same token Sam felt no impulse to cover them or to close the book.

"You lost your wife," Masters said.

"Girlfriend. I had already lost her."

She nodded. "Yes."

The distant pain of Sam's burned throat reasserted itself, a cindery-tasting lump he had to swallow to speak again. "I'm sorry."

"Yes," Masters said again. She looked back at his face. Her eyes were brown. Her cheek was pinked over from being rubbed raw by the canvas of the airbag. On her delicate complexion, it would take the waves of abrasion a long time to fade. The blush of tragedy. Sam thought it was captivating.

Dr. Masters' fingers twitched as though she was fighting back the urge to reach out to him. "So here we are, broken. Coming together again," she said.

Sam couldn't tell whether she was talking about the healing of their individual bodies, or this meeting. Perhaps the two were indistinguishable.

She raised the cane she carried-hospital-issue this time, with a taupe plastic grip and three rubber-tipped feet.

"Yes," he said.

"Do you feel the same? The same as before?" Masters asked.

"No."

"Are you grieving?"

Sam was much more comfortable with the litany of questions, delivered in her gentle monotone, than he might have thought he'd be. "I don't know," he told her with complete honesty.

She looked again out the window, the white light erasing the lines of her face like an overexposed photograph. Only her red mouth remained sharp. Sam felt a leap of panic in his chest at the irrational thought of her simply dissolving into that light, a final question frozen on her lips.

"I don't think I'm the person who was married to my husband anymore," she said. "Do you think I should grieve?"

"I don't know," Sam said again.

She showed him her blush-burned face once more. "To know who you are, you need to break."

"Who said that?" Sam asked.

"Someone I know."

"It sounds like poetry."

"It's better, I think," said Masters.

"What's your name?" asked Sam. "Your first name?"

"Meg."

"Meg," he repeated. "I'm Sam."

"The doctors told me I'll need to come back once a week for physical therapy, Sam."

His name in Meg's mouth made Sam's chest constrict. He didn't respond.

"I'll need another car for that," she said. "I want to drive again. I'm afraid, but I want to."

In spite of the configurations that filled his notebooks, the repeated intersections of metal and flesh in symbiotic deformity, the thought of getting behind the wheel again himself had not crossed Sam's mind until then.

"I won't be driving for a while," Sam said, gesturing to his legs. He wondered then if he would use a cane just as Meg did. Or if he would even walk.

"Physical therapy, then," she said.

"No insurance," said Sam. "They want me out of here and off the state's dime. The doctors say I'm due for release in four days."

"Four days," Meg said, pursing her lips as though she were testing the feel of foreign words in her mouth. "I'll pick you up."


	4. Chapter 4

The wheelchair with the stencil, yellow on blue, was the last grudging gift to Sam Winchester from Northern Nevada Regional Hospital. The orderly had pushed the chair to the elevator, stood silent behind Sam while a woman's voice, made remote and depersonalized by digital recording and filtered through a time-worn speaker, announced each descending floor. No more beeps or bell tones, no more plastic matrices of Braille beside the buttons. Ease for the benefit of the blind. Or the newly blinded.

Until he had spent weeks on end inside one, Sam had thought of hospitals as places of recovery. He saw now that they were only way stations, full of the same cheap trinkets and weary expectation as a highway truck stop.

But at this way station, it was impossible to exit through the same door you came in. You moved through the building's innards in peristaltic jerks, through crises in diminishing circles like a foucault pendulum. The door that served as an exit held a new vista, set you on a different road altogether.

A hospital is not only the terminus for the dead, but for everyone; the people who go in are not those who come out.

The orderly stopped, as if in deference to the hard border, with his rubber-soled shoes at the threshold of the automated doors that hissed and fled aside as Sam and his wheelchair approached.

"Is someone coming to pick you up?" the orderly asked.

Clutching his drawing notebooks to his chest, Sam looked back as the doors tried to rush closed but were stymied by the sensor and the orderly's solid feet. Sunlight fell in a white sheet just beyond the wide, sweeping portico. A silver Mercedes idled at the elbow of the curve, making a low thrum that mocked the swish-halt-swish of the doors. Air conditioning from inside fought and lost as the heat wrapped around Sam's back.

"Yes," he said.

The orderly nodded and turned, allowing the the doors to rush behind him. Over the noise of their closing, which pushed a final breath of cold into his long hair (_when had his hair grown past his collar?_), Sam heard the car surge into gear and move.

It pulled up, pluming the sweet exhaust of a diesel engine. Behind the wheel was a woman with short, peroxide-blonde hair.

"Sam," Meg said. She swung a high-heeled leg out of the opened door. She wore a short skirt, even though the visible flesh stretching from heel to hemline was mottled purple and yellow.

It took him just a moment to see through the drowning light, but yes, it was the same face he had seen in the hospital corridor. In his room, beside his bed. The cropped hair glowed electric. Her eyebrows were still dark brown.

"I didn't recognize you," Sam said.

Meg only smiled in response. Her lips were painted the color of wine. "Let's get you into the car."

With that said, she still stood at the open door, one hand on the smooth arch above the window in lieu of a cane, until Sam had managed the journey down the access ramp and maneuvered around the car's silky fender to the passenger side.

He gave the bright metal a wide berth. The car did not have a single scratch.

Propping herself up with a hand splayed on the broiling metal of the hood, Meg worked her way around the car without the cane, and opened the door. The chemical scent of factory-new interior flooded out on the air conditioning. Sam felt lightheaded amid the light, the heat, the smell.

He tossed his notebooks onto the floorboards and flipped the brake on the chair, reaching out toward the gray leather seat. Meg stopped him with a hand on his thigh as soon as he was settled on the seat's edge. Then she knelt, uninjured leg first to the mica-flecked concrete and followed by the damaged one.

"Let me help," she said.

Her hands were small but her arms strong-almost preternaturally so-as she lowered Sam's plaster-wrapped legs one by one from the footrests to the pavement. His protest stuck in his throat as she began to lift each of his legs up over the running board and onto the dark upholstery. Her face, lit from above in the unforgiving afternoon, showed reverent concentration at the task.

When Meg bent at the waist to place each of Sam's feet with deliberation in the dark well below the dash, Sam stared into the black expanse between her white breasts. Perfume welled up from that chasm as her chest pulsed with the exertion of the task. Sam closed his eyes, ground the heels of his hands against them until he saw winking flecks of broken windshield.

He did not open them again until Meg closed the door. He watched her with eyes fuzzed by pressure and daylight, swinging through the space in front of the car. He held his right hand tight against his left to keep from breaking the perfect glass to reach for her.

It wasn't until they drove away that Sam realized she had left the wheelchair. If no one came for it, the plastic seat would wilt, and the metal fittings would grow hot enough to burn skin.

The corona of Meg's blonde hair was almost too bright to look at, but Sam stared until his eyes watered.

"Is it yours?" he asked.

"Is what mine?"

"The car."

"It was my husband's," she said. "He drove it twice. Once from the dealer's lot and once to the drive-thru coffee shop." At last she looked at Sam, and took one hand off the steering wheel to point at the crest where the seat rose from beside the center console to cradle her hip. "There's latte on the leather. Right there."

Sam bent, leaning into the wash of her perfume, and looked. There was a line of irregular droplets, pale milk, now dried and crusting.

"It looks like semen," Meg said.

Sam said nothing.

"Maybe he drove it three times," she said. "Maybe the last trip was a late-night tryst while I slept. The motor is quiet enough to slip out of the garage if it was open. He could have taken a woman-someone I never met, someone he never planned to see again-and stopped out of the view of streetlights. An alley, or a parking lot. Can you imagine him moving the seat back to bring her over into his lap, there underneath the shadow of a tree?"

Rather than making her angry or distressed, Meg's speculations on her dead husband's infidelity seemed to invigorate her. She sat up, eyes wide and palms roving the seamed leather of the steering wheel. Her voice rose in pitch, as if she were describing a thrilling film.

"Do you know the shape of the mark a steering wheel makes on a woman's back when she has sex in the front seat?," she continued. "No, of course you don't. Those kinds of trysts, and those kinds of women, aren't for examining afterward." Meg spoke lightly, the corners of her lipsticked mouth turned up. "The mark fades, of course. Nothing is left to remember the night by."

"Did your husband cheat on you?" Sam asked.

"I don't know," said Meg.

"How is it? Driving again?"

Her response was immediate. "It's the one thing that didn't change. My body still remembers. You'd have to destroy your head to forget. Like, really fuck it up. Not just your face, but your brain. Knock it around in there like a tennis ball. It only happens in older cars."

"The airbag can do it," Sam said. He felt breathless, his voice sounded small. He was confused by Meg's aimless monologue, their driving and driving with no apparent destination.

"No," she said, with a slow shake of her head. "A fucked-up face is the best disguise," she said, brightening. "No one can tell how bad things are behind it." At that, she reached over and drew a fingertip through the minefield of scars between Sam's brow and chin. Her smile was tender and the movement was smooth, cocooned by the Mercedes' costly suspension.

"Meg," Sam said. "The road."

She only laughed.

They pulled into a lot that stretched out from the shadows of the overpass well into the flatland behind it. It was ringed with a high chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. A man in a dusty jumpsuit stepped out from a small, enclosed cabin at the gate.

Meg rolled down her window. "Masters," she said. "The 2009 Lexus LS 460. This is my insurance adjuster."

Either the man didn't notice Sam's casts, or he didn't care. "Row 21, at the end."

Long afternoon sunbeams washed the clustered suburban homes into pixelation toward the foot of the mountains. Anticipation that verged on fear pinned Sam to his seat as Meg navigated through the bumpy impound lot to its fenced edge. It was a primal feeling, tied to the possibility of seeing the burned-out shell of Jess's Audi in the yard.

The fact that remnants of her body, charred beyond all recognition or retrieval, would remain in the destroyed passenger seat Sam acknowledged with sort of a detached curiosity. What he feared was that the sight of the car-its implications-would end the haze-limned dream of his sudden rootlessness with abrupt reminders of his ties to the greater world. The world beyond Meg and their injuries and the sinuous vehicle in which they slid through the aftermath in this broken automotive battlefield.

As they reached Row 21, though, the only fire-damaged car Sam had seen was an old Lincoln, the sear-marks on which mocked the orange flames that had been painted on its hood.

At the end of the row, the mutilated Lexus stood by itself and Meg circled it, describing a close path, hands tight and white on the steering wheel. The tires of her husband's Mercedes complained against the dusty gravel.

Through her window, then his own, Sam saw the way the car had been reshaped: the driver's side wrenched backward with the force of the collision so it curved in toward the rear wheel. The support bar between the front and rear doors stood naked, with impact-sprung folds of corrugated metal rippling outward from its dark heart. Bits of glass shone in within the shaded interior like drops of moisture.

Meg stopped and cut the motor. Sam was closest to the shattered husk of her car, its new sculptural furrows facing away from him. The driver's door was gone, making it seem unornamented compared to the other side, where the doors were pressed toward one another as if in contemplation.

"You were driving?" Sam asked.

"Yes," Meg said. "It was my car."

Coming at one another as they had been on the highway, it should have been the drivers, Meg and Sam, who took the brunt of the crash's force. But each of their passengers had been killed instead.

"How did this happen?" Sam asked.

Meg kept her tone light and noncommittal,as if giving the details of a shopping trip. "You drifted into our lane. Almost across it. You made the right choice, correcting for the opposite shoulder instead of trying to get back into your lane."

"I don't remember anything. How do you remember it?"

For the first time since they left the hospital, Meg looked across the center console to meet Sam's eyes. "It was the same choice I made."

She opened the door and stepped out, suppressing a groan of effort as she swung her bruised leg onto the uneven ground. Meg picked her way around the back of the car this time, leaving Sam almost panicked at being out of her sight line, as if the blood of her dead husband could claim her back and sever the fibers of their natal connection.

Sam watched as she approached the Lexus. Her legs braced wide, Meg bent to brush bits of glass from the seat, a rainfall onto the ground below. She wore nothing under the short skirt, the fact revealed to Sam in shadowy outline. For the first time in her presence, he felt his cock stir.

Licking absently at a laceration from the glass on her fingertip, she lowered herself to sit inside the car. If the torn leather, hot from sitting for long hours in the sun, caused her any discomfort, it did not register.

The day was so still that she was audible even through the window glass. "Open the door, Sam."

Heat rushed in as he did.

"I thought about it the whole time I was at the hospital," Meg said, fitting her spine into the familiar curve of the seat again. "The choices we made. What we choose when we only have seconds to decide seems like it should be the most true, don't you think?"

Another musing riddle Sam chose not to answer. He watched her Bordeaux-painted lips form the words.

"At first I was angry," she continued. "But having so much time to think, I wondered if we shouldn't meet. My husband and your girlfriend met, even if it was through the skin of a car. It was like a kiss. The last of their lives. The first of ours." As she spoke, she traced the dark rippling stain that decorated the torn and hanging fabric of the car's roof.

"Are you saying this was meant to be, or something?" Sam asked. His own voice emerged curious, not dismissive.

"Nothing that vulgar," she said, looking over at him and raising a sculpted eyebrow. "Only...I guess it feels like symmetry."

Sam leaned into the space between the two cars-one whole and one broken-reaching his hand out to touch Meg for the first time. His long fingers encircled her nape, fingertips almost meeting like a cervical collar at her fluttering throat.

She took an abrogated breath and closed her eyes.

Surprising himself, Sam let her go and threaded his fingers instead through her short hair, guiding her toward him with a firm grip. Meg sighed and allowed herself to be pulled from the car, wrested from the cocoon where her husband's blood baked and fell away. She tumbled to the glass-littered ground like a penitent kneeling on salt.

Sam kissed her lips and she opened to him, her tiny, sharp teeth pressed hard against his mouth as the gravel and glass dug into her knees.

Meg bit his lower lip, opened her eyes, and put a hand on his groin. Meg made quick work of the button and zipper of his jeans with practiced fingers. The surrounding air was warm on Sam's skin and her hand warmer still.

The smears of lipstick blurred the edges of Meg's mouth and gathered to darken the base of Sam's cock as she sucked him, until it was impossible to tell where he ended and she began. And then it didn't matter. In a bare moment he was coming, transfixed by the flex and flicker of muscles from his shaking thighs to the base of her throat.

Meg lay languid across his lap, and Sam pulled his fingers through the dandelion tuft of her hair from scalp to severed ends, again and again. One of the notebooks he had kicked aside in ecstatic haste now fell open atop his castbound foot. Sam felt Meg's breath catch against his thigh.

She reached down to trace the silk-thin lines of the drawing before her, pressing blood-colored kisses to stain the knee of his pants.

"There's someone I want you to meet," she said.


	5. Chapter 5

Back behind the wheel, Meg dabbed primly at her mouth with a brown paper napkin from the glove box. Sam knew he wouldn't be able to look at the lipstick smudges at the knee of his jeans without getting hard.

"What will you do with the car?" Sam asked.

"Leave it," said Meg.

It was the answer Sam had expected. The destroyed Lexus would linger at the yard until it was scrapped, standing tribute in a sculpture-garden homage to anonymous injury and death. In any case, Meg carried the marks that the crash had left on her; the car was no longer necessary.

"Where are we going?" asked Sam.

"Home," said Meg.

She relaxed into the feel of the car as they drove away from the lot, steering only with the pads of her fingers on the wheel. Sam let the smell of the leather fill his nose and imagined light touches on his own skin. They did not speak for a long while.

When they glided with slim tires whispering to the pavement under the gaudy Reno arch, Sam reached past the console and beneath the teasing hemline of Meg's skirt. She spread her legs to accommodate him, wet and expectant.

Meg drove the Mercedes as an extension of herself while Sam fingered her. Pushing it into small accelerations as she ground against him. Trapping his hand tight between her thighs as she navigated the gentle curves of the road, and rolling to rest at last as she came with a shudder of taxed brakes.

Sam withdrew his hand and twined his wet fingers between hers on the steering wheel, massaging. The scent of her cunt mingled with oiled leather made his head spin as he raised the fingers to his nose.

"We're here," she said, adjusting her skirt. "My cane is in the back. Can you reach it?"

Sam fumbled under the rear seats until he touched a length of smooth, polished wood cooled by the artificial atmosphere of the car. When he pulled the cane forward, he was disappointed to see a plain silver finial rather than the eight-ball from his dream. It might have been a little tawdry for Meg in any case, but the disappointment stood.

She took the cane and pushed out of the car with more grace than her injuries should afford her. "Wait here," she said, and closed the door.

As the engine of the Mercedes clicked and cooled, Sam looked around him. The neighborhood seemed too rough for a professor, he thought. Much more like a place John Winchester would call home.

To the left rose a brick-façade industrial building. Some of the windows of were boarded with plywood sheeting and the black eyes of others were lashed all around with spikes of broken glass. Across the street, an adobe church stood empty, its faded plastic sign and neon crucifix both dangling askew. A man in a white head-wrap and paint-stained coveralls stepped out of the reinforced door of a corner shop and stood squinting at the afternoon.

Few people passed on the street, and none gave the luxury car a second look.

There was a hollow rattle from the side of the building, and Sam saw a manual overhead door open, pulled up on frayed ropes by a man in a skullcap. Meg limped from the darkness, motioning for the man to follow her with a wheelchair.

Sam opened his door.

"This is Rufus," Meg said, as the man guided the wheelchair beside the car. "Bring your notebooks," she said to Sam.

"Hello, young man," Rufus said. "Can you get yourself into the seat?"

Sam nodded.

Rufus used dark, deft hands to lift Sam's useless legs one by one onto the footrest. Sam could hear his calluses scraping against the seams of his jeans.

Meg hit a button on the key fob and the car yelped. Inside the building was an enormous open elevator. Every hinge on the latticework door shrieked from disuse as Rufus wrestled it back, but the lift cables were in good working order. Rising through two thick stages of steel and insulation, the elevator stopped in front of a loft space where a garden of metal rose from the polished concrete floor.

As the door opened, Sam was able to see the forms more clearly: a skeleton of only chrome, stretching from fender to tail fins, outlining a ghostly 1957 Chevy. A spiral of stripped metal bumpers welded end to end in a helical column toward the sky. A shining intestinal tangle of intake tubes spilling from the clamshell of a rusted hood. The high-ceilinged room, which received only patchy illumination from the scum-covered skylights, was bordered nearly all the way around by crate engines, racing kits, and carburetors in various states of disrepair. It was obvious that they were in the process of being cannibalized to grow the unearthly forest of shapes in the center of the room. There was no motion in the stale air; if not for the shading grime on the windows, the loft might have been warm to the point of discomfort.

A strain of muffled music wended through the space, and Meg followed it with Rufus pushing Sam's chair behind her.

As they drew closer to the source of the music, Sam could make out the melody: Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." It hit him with a pang of nostalgia. His dad used to play the song on the rare instances that he'd taken Sam out on a trip to the store or to the pharmacy. With enough time, childhood always takes on a shine of the unrealistic-especially pronounced for someone whose childhood lay in two distinct parts, shorn by tragedy. John Winchester, Sam realized for the first time, had been nearly as unreachable before his wife's death as he had been afterward.

The staticky stutter of a welding torch greeted them, the intermittent glow highlighting bare feet, a familiar pair of stained jeans, a plaid shirt, a welding mask.

"Dean," Meg said.

The man stood up from his crouch and dropped the torch to the floor, sending residual sparks skipping across the concrete like water bugs. He raised his mask, a wide grin on his scarred face.

Of course it was the same man Sam had seen in the hospital, entering Meg's room, but the sight was still shocking. Close-up, the blotchy scar on his forehead was the same sanguine shade as a port wine stain, bringing to Sam's mind an immediate association with the burgundy lipstick that still ringed his cock. The color of the patchy graft was less disconcerting than the fact that there seemed to be no bone underlying it; the spot undulated in time with what Sam could only assume was his slow heartbeat.

The scar transecting the face of the man Meg had called Dean was livid by contrast, a prominent keloid trail, and his green eyes were luminous to the point of near-madness. His teeth were even, white, beautiful-an unexpected counterpoint.

"This is Sam," Meg said, putting a hand on Sam's back as if his disability extended to his tongue, making him unable to introduce himself.

Sam stuck his hand out.

The hand that grasped his was so rough it felt covered with a thin layer of horn.

"Dean." Dean shucked the welder's mask and tossed it with the same nonchalance as he had the torch. He started off toward the back of the loft space, calling over his shoulder. "Follow my lead, Wheels. Step into my orifice."

Inside the small office suite, the machine-shop smell faded into a strong reek of incense and mildewed carpet.

Scattered through the room was an assortment of sunken and mismatched furniture hardly befitting a crack house. One huge metal file cabinet remained in the corner with an equally huge ring of keys dangling from a plastic hook affixed to its surface. At the opposite corner was an old fashioned water dispenser, complete with conical waxed paper cups. The fluid filling the plastic bottle perched on top was amber-colored, though, with a few bits of unidentifiable flotsam floating near the top.

Without warning or self-consciousness, Dean shrugged off his plaid shirt and the t-shirt beneath, and gave his armpit a sniff. His torso and arms were trim, masculine, well formed, with ropes of muscle shifting below the skin. But the wounds there were like those on his face, writ large. The crepe-textured scar from a ravenous burn had erased the hair on portions of his arm and shoulder, laying like a ragged sleeve. Two purple indentations marred his abdomen-snapped ribs that had never had proper time to heal. Over his sternum was a roughly cruciform scar, and at its nexus was a fresh bruise: the half-imprint of a steering wheel boss.

At that point, another man emerged from a door at the left-hand side of the room that so closely matched the color of the outdated wood paneling that Sam hadn't noticed it at first. Like Meg, the man had a limp, but much more pronounced. He walked by swinging an almost immobile right leg around the axis of his left with each step. He had a pleasant face and bright blue eyes under dark hair, but wore a vacant, removed expression that made it seem as though another face had been grafted over his own by a sloppy hand. Enhancing the effect was the arc of curious circular scars placed like points of attachment at regular intervals across his brow.

When Sam looked back over at Dean, he saw he had donned a worn cotton shirt, the cuffs buttoned over the crinkled scar tissue that began at his wrist. He found himself almost bereft-gripped by an inexplicable need to study Dean's injuries as he would a schematic. Once again, Sam pressed his palms against the notebooks on his lap.

"What is this place?" Sam asked.

"My workshop," Dean told him. "My headquarters. My sanctum sanctorum. This is where the shit goes down."

"Not the real shit," Rufus said.

"Not the real shit," Dean agreed. "But it's our base of operations."

"You're not a doctor," Sam said. "What do you do?"

"I am a doctor. Just like Meg here. Well, not _just_ like her. I'm a scientist of trauma."

"You're not a doctor," said the dark-haired man, who wore a tan trench coat despite the stuffy atmosphere of Dean's "office."

Dean chuckled, a sound like radials on crushed stone. "Meet Castiel. He's kind of a space case, but he's beautiful, yeah?"

Silence settled over the room. Meg rested a small hand on Sam's shoulder.

"Yeah, um, he's a good-looking guy," Sam said.

"I mean he's a beautiful soul," Dean said. "He's an innocent. The perfect project. His wounds weep innocence like Christ himself."

The comparison was overblown, theatrical, Sam thought.

"Do you want to fuck him?" Dean asked.

"What?" Sam said. "No."

"I've fucked him. You should try it."

Castiel stared ahead, a slight tilt to his chin, seeming not the least embarrassed for Dean's candid profession.

"What do you mean, 'the perfect project?'" Sam asked. Meg's hand tightened on his shoulder.

"Look outside, Sammy-boy." Dean walked past the wheelchair, sweeping his arm in a grandiose arc toward the tangles of metal littering the concrete floor. "What you see here is only the smallest part of my art. I'm a sculptural mechanic. I remake what I touch. I'm the wandering angel of the Reno roads."

Sam said nothing, because he had nothing to say. He was overwhelmed, head stuffy in the cloying fog of incense, reeling from the strange shapes on the showroom floor and the stranger network of scars that served to bind these people like spokes around the damaged hub that was Dean. In his presence, even the bruises that decorated Meg's leg seemed to throb and radiate warmth next to Sam's shoulder. He caught her sharp scent again, and it served to clear his head a little.

Dean grinned again and turned on his heel, headed to the water cooler. "Want something to drink?" He yanked a cup from the dispenser and filled it with the brackish liquid. He extended it toward Sam with a wink.

"Is it safe?" Sam asked.

"Of course. It's my special brew, Sammy."

"Don't call me that." Sam took the cup anyway. When he raised it to his nose, he smelled spice and strong liquor. When he sipped it, a warm, almost chemical burn slipped over his palate and down his throat, reawakening the damaged tissue with the sensation of a thousand tiny mouths baring their teeth.

"Good boy," Dean said. "Drink up. I don't believe you've officially met Rufus. Rufus is completely fucking crazy."

"Stone cold," said Rufus, still standing behind Sam's wheelchair.

"So that's our team. My old friends Rufus and Cas. Meg. And now you."

Sam's head reeled, he blinked to clear his vision, taking another sip of the bracing concoction. "Symmetry," he said, a low mumble.

Dean tipped his face toward the sickly overhead lights and howled laughter. "Symmetry is overrated," he said.

The pressure of Meg's hand disappeared; Sam felt he was untethered and drifting. The lights in the room pulsed.

"By the way," Dean said, "Meg told me you might have something to show me."

Sam shook his head. Oily swirls scudded along the top of the liquor as the paper cup shuddered in his grasp. "What did-what's in this?"

"Sam, Sam, Sam," Dean said. "What are we going to do with you?" His tone was chiding, brotherly.

Sam's fingers lost their strength and the cup tumbled, spilling into his lap, warm as the rush of orgasm. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was Dean's sharp-toothed grin.


	6. Chapter 6

Waking into blurred consciousness, Sam heard a rhythmic tapping seven...eight times before he realized it was the smack of a callused palm against his cheek.

"Rise and shine, Sammy," Dean said, almost nose-to-nose with Sam. His breath smelled inexplicably of chlorine. "You're free."

Sam blinked. His eyes felt gummy and swollen. The smell of burnt fiber hung heavy on the air. Creeping up from the soles of his feet, Sam felt cold, then tingling, then agony.

"Fuck!" The pain cleared his head, but he was still too dizzy to sit up. It felt like his bones were pushing at the skin of his legs. Dean turned away for a moment, motioning for someone out of Sam's sight line to come closer. Meg's face, marked with dispassionate curiosity rather than concern, swung into view. She passed something into Dean's palm. Her hand was small and white; his, freckled and huge.

Dean's one-sided smile crinkled the eye with the scarred, sagging lid nearly into invisibility, making it look like he was winking. Through the pain, Sam wondered whether it was a look he had cultivated.

"Take these," he said, holding out two white tablets.

Still drug-clumsy, Sam swung his forearm in an arc and knocked Dean's hand aside, sending the little pills somersaulting through the air.

Dean shrugged and turned away, giving a chuckle.

The pain, a radio frequency, screamed all the way up into Sam's teeth. He clenched his jaw until the ache registered over it.

Meg returned, carrying the pills. "You should really take these."

"I don't want anything from him," Sam said.

"It's just aspirin, Sam. It'll take the edge off."

He was prepared to brush them away, sweep the scythe of his strengthening arm to Meg's fragile wrist without regard for potential damage, but then he caught sight of his legs.

The casts were gone, and so was his hospital garb. Below a pair of clean but worn boxers, his legs jutted weak and birdlike; the muscles had wasted within their confinement. The skin was ashen, and crenellated purple ridges meandered across it in no discernible pattern. In places, Sam could still see the remnants of undissolved sutures like the waving legs of helpless insects along some of the lines where the skin of his shins had been cut and peeled away to place the metal struts and pins. Invasion of his very bones-the most intimate penetration.

Given weeks to knit while he was in the hospital, Sam registered only a dull ache from the repaired fractures, owing to the shock of returning flexibility. The brighter, more unseasoned pain centered around two red lines that striped his skin from hip to ankle, erupting in certain spots into small blisters. The lines were straight and precise enough to have been drawn with drafting instruments.

Finally able to brace his arms behind him, without fear of his joints folding, on the painted metal of the old desk where he was laid, Sam sat up, wonderment pushing in cool-fingered tendrils through the pain.

"What did you do?"

Dean turned, the scarred portion of his face in shadow like a half-mask. "I set you free." Again, that lopsided grin giving the appearance of a puckish wink. He held up an implement like a miniature gas pump on a sinuous cord.

Sam had picked up enough about car repair through his dad's tinkering to know it was an acetylene torch.

"You should really take these," Meg said, offering the tablets once again.

Sam allowed her to pass them, warm and dissolving from the sweat of her skin (_perhaps she wasn't as unperturbed as she seemed?_), into his hand. He chewed them both at the same time, suppressing a grimace at the bitterness.

"They won't heal," Sam said. He thought he should feel indignant, but the statement lacked the force of a complaint. It was an observation, rather, and one that bothered Sam far less than he would have thought as the effect of the tranquilizers continued to wear off.

For his part, Dean seemed to pick up on that. His tone was kinder. "They're as healed as they need to be." Between the shadows at the edges of the room and the fullness of the overhead lights, Dean looked otherworldly, as if shifting between planes bit by bit. Bizarre cubist polygons flickered in and out of dim translucence across his body-themselves remade by the altered geometry of his form. The garish graft scar above his eyebrow pulsed in perfect time with his quickening heartbeat.

When Dean pressed his hips forward, out from underneath the shadow of his broad shoulders, Sam could also see he was aroused. Until Dean spoke, Sam did not know whether the shift into the light was intentional.

"Look at you, man," he said, reverent. "You're a work of art."

Before the office fell quiet, vacant except for Sam and Meg, a silent Castiel had rubbed burn salve into the blistering wounds on Sam's legs. Quite unlike Dean's, Castiel's fingers were soft. But with the nerves still alight even behind the dampening fuzz of the analgesic, the pain-pleasure of raw exposure under a gentle touch nearly drove Sam to distraction. His sutures throbbed like capillaries with their own discrete pulse, set by the lulling rhythm of Castiel's strokes on his skin.

"You've got your own racing stripes, Sammy!" a manic Dean had announced as he bounded around the office. He had been tearing pages from Sam's notebooks and pinning them to the walls with penny nails, his monologue interrupted only by the hammer's gunshot punctuation.

Sam figured out pretty early that it wasn't worth trying to get Dean to stop using the nickname. Only in his introduction had he called Castiel by his full name; the rest of the time he called him "Cas." If the diminutive bothered the man, he kept it behind the screen of his taciturn compliance.

Now absent Dean's activity, and his demented cartoon-character whistling, a batting of silence had settled over the space. Occasional footsteps rang in the loft proper, but the musty enclave of the office belonged to Sam and Meg.

Through the door where Cas had first emerged there was a makeshift sleeping room with a scattering of mattresses laid directly on the floor. Some abutted one another like mah jongg tiles, and others were pushed into the corners at some distance from the rest. No identifying detritus could be seen marking a single bed as belonging to any one of the company.

This notion was reinforced as Meg guided Sam-supporting the weight his shaky, denuded legs could not take-to the mattress nearest the door. They lay on sheets sueded with age, Sam's body curled around her intense warmth, his bare and frigid feet swaddled in a brown coverlet.

Meg fairly vibrated; a tight-drawn web of hummingbird energy. "Did it make you uncomfortable?" she asked. "When Dean asked if you wanted to fuck Cas?"

Her use of the nickname did not go unnoticed. Sam phrased a careful reply. "It caught me off guard."

"Have you ever been with a man?" Meg asked.

"No."

"You should have Cas. He's soft," she said, "and hard."

"You've been with him."

"Yes." A pause. "Dean wants you."

The statement was neither a revelation nor a source of discomfort to Sam, but he did not reply. Even in his absence, Dean was the nexus of the group. His unsettling magnetism drew conversations, thoughts-even fantasies-back toward him.

"Have you had sex with Dean?" Sam asked Meg.

"Say 'fuck,' Sam."

"Have you _fucked_ Dean?" he asked, drawing Meg back hard against him so her breath caught.

She turned placid, almost limp, the oscillations below her skin calming. "Yes." At the same time, she pushed backward to press against Sam's crotch. "Do you want to know what it feels like?"

"Yes," Sam said, sliding his hands along Meg's bare thighs.

She squirmed, and hitched her skirt up over her hips. "His hands are rough," she said. "You've felt them. You can hear them scrape on your skin. Like little breaths."

Sam drove his burgeoning erection against her bare skin, the fabric of the boxers suddenly grating on the sensitive skin. The wounds on his legs burned like forked lightning.

"Can you imagine those workman's fingers on you?" Meg asked. "Inside you?"

Trying and failing to suppress a low grunt, Sam slipped his cock through the fly of the boxers, pressing it in the dark cleft of Meg's ass. She sighed: a contented sound, a provocation.

"Tell me," Sam said.

"He's not rough, not brutal," said Meg. "Just alive. Always moving."

Sam gripped behind her knee and slung her leg back over his, opening her up. When he pushed his hand down between them, her wetness filled his palm, hot and cool at the same time. "More," he said.

"The first time we fucked, he took me on the hood of his car. It was still warm. I could hear the ticking of the engine cooling. The chrome of the grille left a red band across my legs. I could feel it for days."

Sam began to crook his fingers inside her, but Meg grasped his wrist and said, "No. I don't want you where Dean was. Not this time." She guided him backward.

Exhaling through his teeth, Sam pushed two fingers still slick with Meg's copious wetness inside her. She breathed in deep, but did not resist. The constriction was beyond anything he had imagined. Jess had never wanted to try this, no matter how drunk she was, but Meg opened to the invasion with another sweet sigh.

"His cock is beautiful," Meg said, pushing into Sam's touch. "Not as big as yours, but lovely." She began to touch herself, her long nails grazing his fingers. "Put it inside me, Sam."

"Give me your hand." Sam gasped as her wet palm made contact with his erection. He removed his fingers and pushed forward in a smooth motion, tentativeness lost in the fervor with which he wanted her.

This time, Meg did cry out, but it was rapturous, slamming into the wall and rebounding to ring in their ears. Sam held her tight, giving nothing but small twitches of his hips, a reminder. Inside Meg, he felt unmoored in a way he never had. It was a proximity that bred distance, reduced them both to the mechanisms of their bodies and pried the experience into abstraction as she continued her aloof descriptions of Dean's body.

"It's soft," said Meg. Her voice was thinner, tighter. "Dean's cock. To the touch, I mean. Not like the rest of him. Like you."

A surge of envy overtook Sam; he began to move, still crushing Meg against him. Her skin glowed, and he traced white trails across its expanses. At the same time, in the half-blind rush of sex, he imagined he could feel Dean's flesh underneath his hands-the piebald scarring, the knots of muscle. He pushed his hands up under Meg's shirt to grab her breasts roughly, to anchor himself.

"If he asked to touch you, would you let him?" asked Meg.

Sam wanted to rise to his knees, to shove himself into her, but he knew his legs would not support him. Not yet. He pushed his fingers deep into the flesh of her hips. "Yes."

"I've never seen it before," Meg said, returning a hand between her legs to finger herself. "The way he looks at you."

The barest note of jealousy coloring her voice goaded Sam. He felt wild as he never had with Jess or anyone else. Pain twisted inside him-the raw blisters on his legs, the ache of the bone struts, even Meg's nails stabbing at the base of his cock as her movements mirrored his frenzy-but it also served to hasten his incipient orgasm.

"Would you let him suck your cock?" Meg asked, breathless now.

Sam panted hard in her ear, wordless nothings, but did not answer.

"Sam," she prodded.

"Yes."

"Would you...?"

Sam let his eyes slip closed, preparing for the rush.

"Sam," Meg's voice floated up from the void. "Would you suck Dean's cock?"

"_Yes._" The answer slipped from his throat unbidden. Still, Sam couldn't decide in the aftermath what had startled him more: that he had made the admission, or that saying it had made him come.

He shuddered, an image of Dean's lantern-light grin unfolding itself by the zip of his jeans-jeans cut off him in surgery, lost to a bio-waste incinerator. Sam gave in to the sharp press of his own teeth through his lips as he buried his face in Meg's shoulder, and the vision was gone.


	7. Chapter 7

Over the next few days, Meg stayed more or less by Sam's side as the burn blisters crusted over, sloughed, and faded to pink. On more than one night during that time, she'd brought him a wobbling paper cup full of the doped booze so Sam could forget the pain and sleep. Cas kept jealous guard over the pot of burn salve, only giving it over on the rare occasion that Dean asked him to.

Still, on at least one occasion, Sam had woken in the dawn hours to see Cas standing sentinel in the corner of the room, hands in the pockets of his filthy trench coat, just watching over him with a benevolent expression.

With the palette of bruises fading from her skin, Meg turned over the use of her cane to Sam. The first time he stood unaided, he expected the patchwork bones simply to crumble at their weak artificial joists, slice through the skin and leave him useless. But they held fast as his muscles fought to keep up with renewed demands. He went to sleep twice as sore each night as he had been when he'd joined the track team-newly gangly-as a hurdler in middle school.

The rest of the sutures dissolved or fell away, letting the skin settle and fill its new topography. Sam's legs showed a tangle of ring roads and patternless byways, but he nurtured an abstract gratitude to Dean and his acetylene torch for giving him the brand that linked them all together. Only shared experience can bind a group of strangers. And in this singular culture of mutual injury, where wounds became bridges, all of the hurts he did not share with Meg and Dean and Cas and Rufus-the neglect of his father, the loss of Jess-faded into nonessence.

Pain was temporality, but scars perpetuity.

Sam began to crave the way Meg-and Dean-watched him grow into the new geometry of his flesh. He began to see _as Dean saw_. Even the most carefully remodeled car was the product of one man; it had no agency. A remade man was a fusion of material and modeler. Each shaky step Sam took was a dual testament, shared like a static charge among the members of Dean's cadre.

But his returning strength bred cabin fever. Sam could walk the perimeter of the loft without the cane now, and had taken to stopping at points and staring up into the grimy skylights as if the bald blue expanse might give him some clue as to time or date.

He had just walked back into the office area when Dean came in. His face was flushed, but his usual jittery energy was contained, concentrated, pushed to a focal point in his steady hand, where he held a glossy brochure with the same reverence as a penitent would a hymnal.

"He's on the move," Dean said. He took the hammer and penny nails and tacked the brochure up next to Sam's drawing of the grasping gear shift knob.

Sam had grown tired of the drawings. They seemed irrevocably two-dimensional, and he had not felt the urge to draw since arriving at the loft. But the saturated blacks and reds of the new poster drew his eye.

"Is that...Crowley?" he asked.

"It's his new show," Dean said, turning toward Sam with his green eyes alight even as he let one fingertip linger on the brochure.

Sam looked closer. Blood-red and jagged letters across the top spelled out "Nightmare." Below it, a man dressed in a black suit stood with arms and eyes upraised like a crucified martyr. Pyrotechnics framed his form with light and cast infernal shadows on his bearded face.

"I thought he quit," Sam said.

Crowley, AKA Fergus Roderick MacLeod, had been a stage magician in Vegas. His shows had a decidedly Satanic bent, featuring spare, skeletal sets he decorated with smoke and flame. A great draw for the younger and "edgier" crowd-they absolutely ate it up. His popularity tanked when a fan with a cell phone camera caught him drunk and slapping his female assistant to the floor. He made a few public apologies and slunk off to rehab and, according to most, an end to his career.

"If this was put up here, he's in rehab here," Dean said. "In Reno. They're floating a trial balloon. Testing the waters."

"Are you a fan?"

A crooked smile. "In a way. C'mon, Sammy. Let's take a drive."

They took the creaking elevator to the small garage. There was no overhead illumination, but when Dean pulled open the rolling door, a slab of light fell across a canvas-draped shape in the corner behind the elevator. Either it had not been there when he first arrived, or Sam had been too addled to notice.

Dean whipped the cover off and a tsunami of dust motes swam into the air and disappeared.

"Meet Baby," he said, voice full of paternal pride. "1967 Chevy Impala. Mint."

The car was black and polished to a high shine. Its looming chrome grille and trim reflected lancets of light into Sam's eyes no matter how he moved. He remembered what Meg had said about her tryst with Dean, and he felt the first warm stirrings of arousal.

"Go ahead," said Dean. "Look her over."

Cane clicking, Sam made a slow circuit around Dean's showpiece. He touched the grille where he imagined Meg's thighs had rested. His twisted reflection moved across the dome of the side view mirror. On the trunk of the car, its name was stenciled in a playful script...in pink.

Sam smiled. It was just campy enough for Dean. And then recognition hit him. "Like James Dean. His car. The name on the back, in the same script."

"That's right," he said. "I knew you were something special when Meg dragged you in."

"James Dean died in that car."

The hooded and languid look Dean gave him, thumbs hooked in his belt loops and a sliver of bare skin showing below the hem of his shirt, made the air around Sam's head feel thick and choking.

"Get in, Sammy," said Dean. "Let's take her for a spin."

When Sam slid into the ridged vinyl bucket seat, his back bowing in the parodic curve that had old men in old cars sloping toward the steering wheel, he saw the gear shift. And gaped. Long and crooked, it was topped with a one-and-a-half-inch wide pewter eight ball.

Until they had driven for a few blocks, Sam didn't even notice that the seatbelts had been taken out of the Impala. He was busy lifting his face to the sunlight from the window, squinting with pleasure.

Dean began to speak as they passed under the Reno Arch.

"Do you ever think about the next step?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You can only take this so far. This thing we're doing."

"It ends when you die, I guess," Sam said.

"No," said Dean, his voice suddenly loud in the confined cabin of the car. "It doesn't end. Death, Sammy, it's the ultimate change. The ultimate metamorphosis. You feel me?"

"Are we talking afterlife stuff here?" Sam asked.

"No, no. Way better," Dean said, taking a hard left that made Sam slip across the vinyl seat toward him. "Infamy. You just come out of nowhere, blazing like a fucking meteor, and burn it into people's brains. Your name disappears, but the _act_, man. That stays. You're just a vessel."

"I don't get it," Sam said. "Nobodies like us die every day. It maybe gets a story in the paper, and you forget the next day."

Dean's lips-very pink-pulled back over his lurid white teeth. "My art is interactive, Sam. You know that. It depends on who you're interacting with."

"Crowley," Sam said, shaking his head, eyes wide. "You're going to take out Crowley."

"Smart boy," said Dean. "In another life, you'd be in college."

"I was," Sam said. His own voice sounded distant, almost lost to the road noise that barreled through his mind and scattered the thoughts he was trying to process.

Dean must have heard, though. His laughter rang through the car.

In a couple of minutes, they pulled through a familiar gate, pea gravel complaining under the car's wide tires. It was the impound lot where Meg's destroyed Lexus was stored. Were they going back to see it? The idea brought with it a flashing memory of Sam's first sexual contact with Meg.

The attendant came out of the guard's hut, smiling when he saw Dean.

"Hey, Rich," Dean said. "Stopping by the Lincoln. That cool with you?"

"You know it is," said the man he had called Rich.

Sam felt an unexpected combination of relief and disappointment that he would not return to the Lexus. It seemed like something Dean would want to see; a sculpture "in the wild," a spontaneous creation from a single second of labor. He wondered if Dean, peripatetic as he was, had left a trail of sculptures behind him as he wandered. Inexplicable shapes abandoned in lofts across the country, monuments whether discovered or left to slowly rust away and assume new forms in their decay. They were surrogates, anyway. Empty substitutions for imprints in flesh, and hooks in the mind.

Dean pulled Baby up alongside a smoke-gray car. Sam guessed its model year was somewhere in the 1970s. It was a real road yacht.

"Check her out," Dean said, cutting the engine. "1972 Lincoln Continental. She looks like a tank, but she runs like a pet cat."

Sam levered himself out of the Impala with his cane and hobbled around the extended front of the Impala to see Dean stroking the jutting front fender of the car and staring toward the low, brown mountains.

"Like what you see?" he asked.

Sam watched Dean's fingers, willing himself to hear the rasp of calluses against the car's metal skin. He wondered if the man could even feel the heat that undulated from the sun-blasted surface.

"Rich lets me keep my stable here," said Dean. "This a goddamn graveyard. Nobody claims these wrecks. If they don't get shipped off to the crusher or picked over for parts, they'll never leave. You can smell the ghosts here." He placed his hand flat on the broiling hood until Sam wanted to rush over and snatch it away.

Dean finally lifted his hand, reaching into his jeans pocket. He turned, grinning, all pensiveness lost. From his fingers dangled a set of keys, sparking in the unforgiving light. "Time you got back behind the wheel."

Anxiety surged within him, but Sam held out his hand for the keys, anyway. Dean hopped up and slid over the hood-a Hollywood move if ever there was one, and waited for Sam to unlock the Lincoln's passenger door. The key slid in, popped the huge, heavy lock button by the window. He couldn't help but smile. Sam hadn't been in a car that had manual transmission since his dad's old Chevy died when he was ten.

The interior smelled of leather and dust. Dean swung in, patted the dashboard.

"Take a drive around the lot," he said. "I've got something else I want to show you."

There was no pain when Sam put his foot on the brake pedal. The engine rumbled to life, smoothly as Dean said it would. Muscle memory took over; he had learned to drive on John Winchester's standard-shift 1986 Chevy Celebrity, and the one pet peeve he had about Jess's Audi was that it had been automatic. The Lincoln's transmission was smooth, flawless even; Dean certainly had an almost supernatural touch with cars.

Sam's legs, his feet obeyed him as though they hadn't been altered. He relaxed into the seat, thumbing the nubs on the oversized steering wheel.

"Swing around there," Dean said. "By that pillar."

Closer to the highway, the rush of traffic was loud as a tide. Dean stepped into the shadows below the overpass, almost disappearing. The black shape he approached resisted any luster, even from incidental light. As Sam's eyes adjusted to the drained half-light, the outline of another car emerged. The paint job was matte black, which was why it was invisible until he was almost upon it. No, not black. Dark gray. A primer coat.

Dean gave his lopsided smile. Predatory, salacious. "This is Lucifer," he said. "1974 Dodge Challenger. The last model year made in the U.S.A., before they shipped production off to Japan and fucked the line for good."

"Lucifer, huh?" Sam said, smiling. He pointed to the chrome bumper guards, where the rubber had been replaced with a shining set of upward-curved horns. "Gotcha."

"You like? I'm going to shine it up for Rufus to use in one of our derbies."

"The demolition kind?" Sam asked.

"The best kind," Dean said, his bisected eyelid dipping and rising again. "If we don't have one every two weeks or so, Rufus gets antsy."

"So why pretty it up if you're just going to destroy it?"

Dean spread his arms wide, casting no shadow in the gloom below the overpass. Still, his lean outline was sharp. "Look at me. I'm beautiful. And I'm destroyed." He laughed, turning 180 degrees, mocking runway poses. The sleeves of his t-shirt rode up, unveiling more of the burn scar. "You're beautiful, too, Sammy. You've got stars in your skin."

It took a second to realize that Dean was talking about the scars on Sam's face. He raised his fingers to touch the tiny wounds, suddenly self-conscious. "And destroyed, I guess."

"Not yet," Dean said.

"You're going to destroy me?" The question was meant half-jokingly.

"No," said Dean, unsmiling. "You are."

The good thing about driving like a novice again-rediscovering the mechanics of the interaction between body and car-was that it kept Sam out of his head. Stopped him mulling over Dean's words, his prognostication. He surged and faltered in the Lincoln, tailing Baby in her crazed path back to the loft.

Sam followed Dean into the creaking elevator, mimicking his halting progress behind the wheel with uncertain steps. Strangely enough, he was anxious to get back into the car, guide it as a truly free agent through the nondescript Reno byways.

_How can you destroy something that doesn't exist?_

The Dopplered echoes of a metallic ringing greeted them on the way up. Rufus, in a garish black-and-yellow racing suit, kicked at the base of one of Dean's statues-a steel fender set on end and pried open like an unfurling leaf, as yet absent a blossom. There may never be one; a statement of some sort Sam would never understand. Dean kept his mind shut up as if ringed with the same steel. And yet he held them all in his field, spinning in the reverse polarity of magnetic resistance. Sam caught himself thinking that Dean's quiet madness might be the thing that held him together.

Rufus, meanwhile, was shaking apart. "Where the fuck have you been?"

Dean waited for him to stop kicking. Rufus gave the piece one last desultory blow, the wavering bell tone suggesting reinforced boots.

"Getting Sammy here back on his wheels," Dean said. "Well, the wheels that count." He aimed a wink-a true wink-back at Sam, who felt his throat go dry.

Rufus glowered.

"And now," Dean said, holding up his forefinger in warning, "_Now_ Sam's going to take us scouting for sites."

Sam was less than pleased with the idea of ferrying a belligerent Rufus around, but as it turned out his concern was moot.

The stunt driver's face split into a broad smile, so wide Sam could see that Rufus was missing one or two of his teeth toward the back. "Surprise me with a good one," he said, and turned back toward the office.

"Get Cas out here, will you?" Dean shouted after him.

Rufus shot him the finger, but Dean only laughed and turned toward Sam. "Field trip," he said. "You're driving."

It felt a little like Sam would imagine driving with his parents for the first time. He himself never had to field the paranoia-inducing stares; at fifteen his dad had tossed him the keys, the owner's manual, and a noncommittal "Good luck."

Now, with his feet sloppy over the pedals and his shoulders hunched toward the road ahead, Sam was so uncomfortable his skin itched. Dean and Cas sat in the back, leaving the passenger seat empty. Cas mostly stared out the window as if at a fixed spot in the blinding sky, but wild green eyes greeted Sam every time he checked the rearview mirror.

"We'll never get there if you're gonna be an old woman, Sammy," said Dean.

"Where is 'there,' anyway?"

"You'll never find out if you don't quit driving like a bitch." When Dean leaned back against the seat, Sam could see he was wearing his half-smile.

"Fine," Sam said, baring his teeth, challenging Dean with a parody of the expression. "Jerk."

Dean's cackle roused even the dream-fogged Cas to attention.

Emboldened, Sam hit the gas and swung the Lincoln around the gentle curves of the expressway until they were at the edge of the city proper. The sparsely traveled cloverleaf intersection where they stopped was walled off from local roads by an unattractive sound barrier buffeted by a row of stunted desert evergreens.

As Sam pulled off, he saw that it was not a road behind behind the boundary but a wide, dusty lot. Sunlight drew a sharp border between the reflective sand and the thin blade of purple shadow stretching alongside the barrier.

"Perfect," Dean said, drawing the vowels out in a lazy slide.

There was a small gasp from the rear seat. Looking into the mirror, Sam saw Cas-eyes closed, face rapturous, an erratic flush pouring from his lips to stain his cheeks. He adjusted the mirror downward. Cas' pants were open at the fly, Dean curling a hand around the man's erection, which Sam could see was urgent against the cloth of his briefs.

Sam flipped the mirror up again, throat tight. Dean licked his lips, gave another wink. The graft scar on his forehead thrummed. Suddenly the smell of sex was thick in the air, musky and wild and masculine. Sam pressed his palm into the crotch of his jeans, unwilling to show Dean just how affected he was.

Dean met his eyes in the mirror again, and maneuvered Cas's slack-jawed face into view so their cheeks were touching. Against Dean's stubble-peppered and weathered skin, Cas was pellucid and smooth, given over entirely to the pink-hued vibrancy of arousal. Dean ran his tongue along the underside of two of his fingers, then pressed them between Cas's lips, even the secondhand connection of their mouths wearing at Sam's resistance.

Sam tried to look away but could not.

"Suck," Dean said, voice low, and Cas obediently closed his lips around the fingers. Dean's eyes dropped closed, first the mutilated, then the pristine. Cas hummed, and Dean pulled his fingers away. Saliva spilled over the pink lips, winding in a slow trail down Cas's chin and neck.

Dean pulled the door open and hauled Cas out by the sleeve of his coat. The man looked almost boneless, his tuft of dark hair brushing the lip of the car's frame as Dean dragged him into daylight. He stood blinking in the sun like a freed prisoner, the image made more ridiculous by the flapping trench coat and the insistent erection distending the fabric of his white briefs.

Sam's own arousal rocketed when Dean yanked the briefs away. Thrown off balance, Cas's groan of discomfort was carried away on the dry wind, but Sam could tell Dean was working his fingers into him. Dean spit into his palm and smirked over the trenchcoat-clad shoulder at Sam.

If his arousal had not been obvious before, it was now. Sam clamped a hand over his still-clothed cock, trying not to lift his hips but desperate for contact. He closed his eyes.

In response, Dean pushed into Cas, giving his naked skin a loud slap as he did so. _Look._

Sunspots danced in Sam's peripheral vision as he opened his eyes again.

"You like that?" Dean asked, looking straight at Sam through the closed window, even though it was Cas who groaned in response. Dean thrust in short bursts that made the Cas's shoes lose purchase on the shifting ground. The balance he lost was compensated for by Dean's firm grip on his hips. Dean rucked up Cas's shirt, and for the first time Sam could see the slim fingers of a burn scar reaching around from his back. The skin was still ruddy, licking along his flank, a flame from flame forever frozen.

It was entrancing; Sam wanted a closer look.

"Touch yourself," said Dean.

It was unclear whether he was talking to Cas or to Sam, but Sam wasn't about to give him the satisfaction, even though his erection ached. He returned his hands to the steering wheel. On the other hand, Cas obeyed immediately.

No sooner than he had wrapped his cock in a tight grip did he come, streaking the glass beside Sam's face.

Sam ground his teeth together hard enough to hear them squeal in his jaw, trying to keep his hands on the wheel.

Dean shouted as he came, slamming Cas's sharp hips, his withering cock, against the smeared window. At last, Sam was able to look away. Staring at the empty lot surrounding them, he heard Dean slide back into the car with a satisfied sigh, leaving Cas to dress himself again and leaving Sam excruciatingly hard.

Another smirk from the rear seat, and Sam knocked the rearview mirror askew so it reflected only the curve of the window and a slice of blue sky.


	8. Chapter 8

Nothing was said on the way back to the loft. Smiling and sex-sated, Cas and Dean shambled from the car into the creaky lift, leaving Sam alone with the Lincoln. He had gone to the far corner of the dark garage, intending to jerk off discreetly. After he came, hard and quick and dirty, into a rag stained with motor oil, Sam saw that at his feet were two buckets full of auto detailing supplies. Unable to quite admit he was sulking, but at the same time unwilling to go upstairs and face Dean and Cas-or worse, Meg-Sam decided to use his find to clean the Lincoln and blow off some steam.

He backed the car out again into the late-afternoon sun, its refracted glow creating twisted, pareidolic shapes in the wash of semen on the window. Sam wandered the perimeter of the building until he found a spigot. It was nearly rusted closed and coughed dirty water for a minute or so when he pried the faucet valve loose, but soon enough it began to run clear into the bucket. When he returned to the car he squeezed out the large sea sponge over the driver's window first, erasing the evidence of Dean's satisfaction, of his own frustration.

Despite a dry heat that chapped his lips and hands, Sam's green t-shirt was almost immediately soaked with sweat. He peeled it off and draped it over the edge of the clean-water bucket, where the hem wavered on the surface like an algae floe.

He worked well into the evening, until the fleeing sun's red edge had almost lost its battle with the night, surprised to find that his legs barely bothered him as he took a knee to lavish attention on the hubcap spokes and dusty whitewalls. It was meditation...and worship. Sam waited out the sunset, hearing the fading desert go still around him. He wanted to see the car in the moonlight.

A wild yellow glow by the horizon quavered over polished curves as Sam circled the car once, twice. Hypnotized, he heard but did not register the squeal of the elevator's rusty doors behind him.

"Now there's a sight." Dean spoke and Sam turned to watch his manic, moon-filled eyes as they flickered between Sam and the car. There was desire there, yes. But also a sort of suspicious confusion, as if Dean felt he couldn't entirely trust what he saw.

Sam remembered when he saw Dean full-on in the office, his shape knitting and unknitting itself below the deceptive fluorescents. Now they stood, both in half-light, matched as if on a plain of battle that they might have charged across, had the space between them not been flickering too. Absent knowledge of weapons or intent on either side, it was the single most terrifying and erotic thing Sam had ever experienced.

The dervish that was Rufus broke the spell. He charged into their midst wrapped in disco-ball drag: a long silver ballgown whose hem brushed the top of his steel-toed boots. Underneath a curling blonde wig, his eyes were wild. Wet lipstick over the wound of his mouth drew away to reveal chattering fencepost teeth. He held a stuffed toy of some sort in the crook of one arm, and adjusted the pillows of his fake breasts with the other.

And the spell broke, Dean falling into laughter and Sam drawing away into self-consciousness. He retrieved his t-shirt, one wet sleeve slapping against his skin.

"The leading lady arrives," said Dean. "Get in that beautiful machine of yours, Sammy. And try to keep up. You won't want to miss this."

Meg, tottering on the rocky soil in her stiletto boots and tight skirt, held out her hand to Sam, palm down as though skipping through a rain puddle on a gentleman's coat. He took her hand, led her to the passenger side. She swung in with legs wide, allowing Sam ample time to see she was bare beneath her skirt.

"Dean and his little games," she said, low enough that only Sam heard.

He closed the door after her and slipped on his t-shirt, the wet patches stinging in the rapidly cooling night.

Dean, Cas, and Rufus were already gunning down the street away from the loft, the latter waving his wig like a limp animal from the open window. Hand on the gear shift and Meg's perfume in his nose, Sam dropped it into third and an arc of gravel poured from the tires and clattered into the buckets behind them.

Sam forced the Lincoln to hug Baby's rear bumper as it jounced and fishtailed, even though he knew that Dean was driving back to the same spot they had scouted earlier in the day. Instead of an empty lot, Sam was shocked to see a small crowd, flanked by portable arc lights and standing on chairs and in truck beds as a sort of ramshackle set of bleachers. They howled and cheered and jumped as Dean pulled in, spinning Baby out in a showy 360. He hopped out of the car and raised his arms, and the congregation only got louder.

Sam pulled up to the periphery of the crowd. Someone started up a portable stereo. The speakers were poor quality and distorted because of the forced volume, but Sam could identify the opening vocals of Kansas's "Carry on Wayward Son." As soon as the grind of guitars rang out into the lot, Dean had clambered up to the top of the sound barrier, megaphone in hand.

Meg opened her door. "Come on," she told Sam.

The throng of viewers included women and men, but all looked to Sam to be the rough-around-the-edges type. The peripherals, given a chance by virtue of clandestine destruction to come into the light. Sam and Meg, now surer on her feet, reached the sound barrier buffeted by scratchy waves of music. A scaffold had been set up below Dean's perch and Cas stood on it, his lips touched by a tiny smile. Rufus was nowhere in sight. In the dimness at the far end of the lot, there was a cargo container of the sort that would be loaded on an eighteen-wheeler, looking forlorn and neglected on cinderblock stilts.

That Dean might have a whole army of acolytes he could draft into setting up this crude entertainment venue where only hours before there had been a vacant lot gave Sam mixed feelings. There was a sense of disconnection, of being dwarfed by overall purpose, but at the same time he was reassured that as a member of Dean's inner circle he might come to see the full scope in time. Or at least as much as he could in the time that Crowley gave them.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Dean's voice snapped out like a whip-crack from the megaphone, making all three of them flinch. "Or should I say, ladies and _ladies_, since none of you have the sack to get behind the wheel tonight? That's okay, bitches. Miss Mansfield will be driving herself."

The roar of an unmuffled engine punctuated his words, and Rufus skidded out behind the wheel of a dark gold-colored coupe. A cheer went up.

"Jayne Mansfield?" Sam asked.

Meg nodded.

"Is he going to kill himself? In front of these people?"

"I don't think so," said Meg.

"Jayne Mansfield drove under a truck," Sam said. "She was decapitated."

"She wasn't decapitated," Cas said, still staring ahead at some fixed point in the dark beyond the cargo container. "That's a common misconception. The top of her head was sheared off." His smile grew a little wider.

"Jesus Christ," said Sam.

"I suspect he isn't here," said Cas. "But Dean has calculated the height of the truck so it will only take the top. Probably the windows, too. Rufus should only lose his wig."

Sam shook his head. "_Should_."

Meg twined her fingers with Sam's, giving his sweaty hand a reassuring squeeze.

The megaphone crackled again, a warning.

"Miss Mansfield is behind the wheel of a 1965 Buick Riviera," Dean announced, unable to hide the glee in his voice. "It's not quite the 1966 Electra of our collective dreams, but good enough for government work."

The person manning the boombox stopped Kansas and put on "Too Hot to Handle." The choice was greeted by a rippling laugh from the remainder of the crowd.

"Ready, Rufus?" Dean asked.

The stunt driver gunned the engine in response.

"Got your little dog?"

Rufus waved the stuffed chihuahua out the window to another round of cheers.

"Take your position," said Dean, his wide grin nearly a rictus. "Time to crunch."

The car belched a white plume of exhaust when Rufus-as-Jayne-Mansfield lined the car up with the cargo container. Sam could see the excited heave of his chest raising the ridiculous fake breasts that were stuffed into the decolletage of his gown.

Afterward, Sam would wonder if the time from Rufus's shrieking launch to the moment of impact lasted as long for others as it had for him. The two or three seconds stretched and pulled into an indeterminate future as murky as the night that enfolded the "truck" in the distance. Then the strike of the collision brought time back into its rightful march.

The roof of the car crumpled like a handkerchief and flew away. For just a moment, it looked like the Buick would skim through, a convertible now but otherwise none the worse for wear. But the near left cinder block tower wobbled on impact and the container shifted downward by an inch, hooking the steel column behind the windows that remained upright and bolstered by the car's endoskeleton. Both side windows exploded in quick succession. Remaining momentum drove the front end of the car upward against the bottom of the shipping container, and another loud pop split the air as the windshield collapsed.

A gasp went up from the crowd.

The steel container swayed but did not fall. Its clutch and pedals abandoned, the Buick rolled backward, clear at least of the container's edge. Someone swung an arc light toward the wreck. Even though the illumination was all but diffused before reaching its target, in the gloom Sam could see that the front half of the car had been smashed evenly down to the level of its doors.

"Get him!" Dean shouted, his voice small now, the megaphone dropped and forgotten.

Meg, Sam, and Cas stood frozen on the viewing platform, but a couple of wide and heavy guys with long, trailing beards broke off from the crowd and ran toward the destroyed car. The yard was so silent Sam could hear their footfalls in the dust.

A moment later Dean was off the barrier and after them. "Push it back! Push it back," he screamed, a note of falsetto panic creeping into his voice.

The bikers hauled back on the car as best they could, unable or unwilling to get underneath to push from the front bumper. Still, the remains of the Buick slid free. A waterfall of glass poured off what was left of its hood.

It rolled to a stop out of the shadow of the container, and Dean met it, scrambling across the trunk and grinding glass into his knees to reach Rufus. The sudden and strong association with the amateur film footage of Jackie Kennedy vaulting over the trunk of her dead husband's convertible sent Sam into motion at last.

He covered the ground with a hard knot in his throat, just as they were pulling Rufus from the car. His head hung oddly loose on his neck. His face was destroyed, mouth fountaining blood as he sputtered and wheezed. Sam saw his chest was sunken where the steering wheel had punched his ribs in splinters back into his lungs.

"Fuck," Dean said, chewing his lip, trying to support Rufus's head as the bikers manhandled him from the vehicle.

Sam watched the stunt driver's patella pop free and slide a few millimeters underneath the clinging fabric of the dress as his legs were pried free of the compacted dash.

The discordant wailing of sirens rose above Rufus's halting breaths.

"Fuck, fuck, _fuck_," Dean said, saliva spraying from between his teeth in a parody of the mist of blood Rufus spat into the air.

Cas arrived at Dean's side, coat flapping like clipped wings. "We need to get him to a hospital."

The lot went dark, the arc lights cut in the flurry of motion as onlookers either hopped in their vehicles or cut and ran for the shelter of the barrier.

"Cops are on top of us," Dean said. "Help me get him to Baby."

"We shouldn't move him," Sam said.

"Shut the fuck up and help me, Sammy."

It was clear Rufus was going to the car even if Dean had to drag him by himself, so Sam supported the man's hips. The wheezing ceased. Sam couldn't tell if the man had passed out from the pain or had stopped breathing altogether.

They wrestled Rufus into the back seat. Blue and red lights scudded along just over the ridge, headed their way.

"Cas, get in," Dean said, his voice low and rough. "Sam, take Meg and go."

Meg was already standing by the door of the Lincoln. Dean was peeling out with a speed that made Sam wince.

"Let's go," he said.

Sitting beside him as Sam threw the car into gear, Meg said, "I don't want to go back just yet." A fat tear slid down her cheek. "Buy me a drink, Sam?"

He nodded and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

They ended up at an adobe-style joint with the "Open" sign in the window the only glimmer of life. The neon letters chased one another, again and again.

Sitting at a splintering bar that smelled of mildewed dish rag, Meg ordered a double scotch and Sam a draft beer. They did not speak for a long time. When Sam placed his hand over Meg's and nodded toward the door, she downed the rest of her drink and pulled a ten-spot from her wallet. Sam left a mostly-full glass.

By the door, he stooped to put his arm around her waist, bury his nose within the earthy-smelling spikes of her hair. "Need you," he said.

Meg nodded up at him, eyes wide and wet.

In the dark parking lot, Sam did not even wait to open the door before pushing Meg's skirt up over her hips, sliding a hand between her thighs. She let her head fall back against the car's frame, eyes closed. Sam pulled her away, opened the rear passenger side door and pushed her across the wide seat. Her lolling head knocked the far window, summoning an unwelcome image of Rufus's broken body.

To push it away, Sam closed his eyes and buried his face between Meg's spread legs, inhaling her before plunging his tongue inside her. She hit her head once more against the glass with a long moan, and grabbed his hair, pulling him closer. Sam gasped and gulped like a dying man, pressing into her with tongue and teeth until she yelped with pain and pleasure, all associations with the derby and the wreck gone for the moment.

Meg sat up, took Sam's face in her hands and kissed away the moisture on his cheeks and chin. Sam grabbed her by the shoulders, slammed her back against the door. She lost her breath in a huff, eyes rolling upward in martyred ecstasy. "Mark me," she whispered.

Bracing his left hand against the door frame, Sam freed his cock with the right, pumping it quick and hard over Meg's crumpled skirt and glistening thighs. He came with surprising force, a pale line of fluid stretching from just below Meg's chin to the vinyl of the seat between their bodies.

He slid out of the car, door still open and cock still in his hand, landing on his ass on the pavement beside the rear wheel. Meg adjusted her skirt and brushed without effect at the stains there, then exited the car from the opposite side.

"You don't understand," she said, just before shutting the door. "Not quite yet. But you will."

Humming tires underlaid the silence between them on the way back to the loft. Meg got out of the car before it rolled to a stop, punishing the gravel walk with her spike heels. She climbed into her late husband's Mercedes and drove away.

All of a sudden, Sam was bone-weary, flushed out and empty. He kicked at the gravel, let the sound rattle in the hollows in his head.

Inside the loft, at first he mistook the surge of harsh breaths for the sighing of the elevator's overtaxed cables. He felt an urgent but sourceless need to preserve the shrouded sound uninterrupted, as though the space itself breathed, a sleeping beast. Sam rolled his feet from heel to toe in his painstaking approach to the office.

The strange tableau beyond the door made him stop short. Two wavering forms moved below a strobing fluorescent panel as if filmed with a hand-crank camera. Dean stood, naked from the waist down, head hanging and hands braced against the wall. Tears pattered onto the scummy carpet, caught mid-fall in the flickering light. Strings of clear and viscous liquid hung from his nose and from his erect cock. Cas stood behind, coat still on, working into him with gentle deliberation. Dean was being fucked too slowly for the shudder and heave of his shoulders to be caused by anything but his deep sobs.

Sam was struck hard by two divergent desires at once: the urge to take Dean's face in his hands, as Meg had his own in the car, and lick the tears away, or to slink in, sink down, and take Dean in his mouth. To swallow that wracking pain. He did neither, but the heavy prospect caused him to stumble. He caught himself with a hand on the doorframe.

If Dean was aware of the intrusion, he didn't raise his head. Cas, however, with unusual clarity in his eyes, looked toward the door and, seeing Sam, nodded once-as slow, smooth, and considered as the slide of his cock into Dean's body.

Fighting vertigo, Sam lurched away from the door and toward the elevator. The Lincoln still smelled of sex and of Meg. Sam spent the desert night huddled on the back seat, curled in on himself and laying his head where the scent was strongest.


	9. Chapter 9

Sam woke to pounding on the window. His jaw ached, and in the haze of waking it took him a few moments to realize that his still-chattering teeth had probably been knocking through the night. He propped himself up on one elbow, arm stiff. Dean stood outside the car, breath condensing on the window beside Sam's head.

"Sam," he said. "Hey, Sam."

"Go away, Dean."

"Come on, man. Open the door."

Groaning, Sam reached over and pulled the handle, giving the armrest a feeble push.

Dean slipped his fingers between the door and the jamb, faster than Sam would have thought possible, and swung it wide. The air outside the car was actually warmer, even though the sun hadn't crested the horizon quite yet.

"Jesus fuck," Dean said, tossing a wadded bundle of fabric into the car. It caromed off Sam's knees and tumbled onto the floorboards. "It's a tomb in here."

But then he tilted his chin, the movement echoing Cas's stilted signature motion, and grinned with one corner of his mouth. The blasted half of his face followed suit a split second late as if the scar were a string through the top of his head triggered to draw up in the event of any motion from the other side. If any of the residual despair from the night before clung to him, Sam couldn't tell.

Dean sniffed the air with the piqued interest of a predator. "Amazing how it sticks around, huh? That smell."

"What do you want, Dean?"

Turning, he stared at Sam for an uncomfortable moment before he said, "She gets so wet, doesn't she?" He shook his head, giving a soft laugh as if the findings from some sort of experiment had come back defying all logic. "Wait till you fuck her ass, man. Incredible."

"I have," Sam said.

Dean's look was appraising, pleased. "Way to go, Sammy. What about Cas?"

In the process of unfolding his freezing and cramped muscles, Sam was in no mood for the conversation. "He seemed a little...occupied last night," he said.

There, again, was the combative flicker within Dean's eyes. The herald of what seemed to be an inner debate over whether to leap on Sam and tear him apart or drag him in and devour him. Or perhaps a debate as to whether the two were the same.

Sam tried his best to match it.

Dean broke first, laughter his perennial escape. "Yeah, Cas is a little fucked-out right now. To be honest, I'm feeling a little shook up myself. But we have an errand of mercy to run."

Sam looked down at the heap of fabric where it was splayed in the footwell. At least one-probably two-white lab coats. "If you want to go see Rufus, you can do that on your own," he said.

"If I wanted to _see_ him, yeah," said Dean. "I want to get him out of there. Last thing he'd want is to be another parasite sucking on the state's titty."

Sam wasn't sure if that last jab was directed at him or not, but he was too exhausted and confused and sore to continue to question Dean's motives. "He'll die."

"He may not," Dean said. "But if he does, at least he'll do it among friends. Where he should be." The little laugh he huffed out sounded forced. "Either way, he's going to have one fucked-up grill."

"A fucked-up face is the best disguise," Sam said.

"Who said that?"

"Someone I know." Sam reached down and grabbed one of the white coats. Whether or not he was too tired to question his own motives, it would be easy to justify it that way instead of looking closer only to find out that he didn't care.

_I'm a ghost, after all. A nothing man._

Dean's face lit up; he reached over Sam's leg to snag the other coat.

"Want me to drive?" Sam asked.

"We'll take Baby."

"I can still drive if you want."

The smile slipped a bit. "Nobody drives Baby but me," Dean said. "Only me. Until the end."

It was a shock to the system seeing Northern Nevada Regional again. Sam realized he had not looked back at it since the orderly who pushed him out onto the sidewalk had retreated back within its cold confines.

The building slid out of his view as Baby screeched up the parking ramp, and all at once Sam knew that Rufus was going to die. He was pretty sure that Dean knew it, too. The thought actually calmed him; the hospital was too orderly by far to be the final stop for a live wire like Rufus. Sam had thought of it once as a portal for transformation, but it was really only so for those who went on to wind down to their own ends outside of its walls. It was a place of preparation.

The pale orange brickwork of the main building, meant to be innocuous, was foreboding. Bright things, clean things-they always had something to hide. That which was torn was open invited sensation just as much as invasion. At Dean's side, Sam was transcending, breaking from a man into a collection of stories told on his skin. The more completely they shattered, the higher the chance would be of one of those stories lodged inside public memory. A shard of glass working in, waiting to touch bone.

Sam was all at once just as anxious as Dean to pull Rufus out of there and let the man die as he lived: violated, screaming, a collapsing star. In pain, but free.

They shrugged on the coats like they were armor, and in the half-world of the hospital that's just what it was. Despite their dirty clothes and shredded jeans, lean and abused faces, no one gave them a second glance. Sam followed at Dean's shoulder, back up to the trauma wing where Dean-via Meg-had first taken the helm of quavering recovery-dreams.

Swinging by the nurses' station at the juncture of two hallways, Dean snagged a clipboard without stopping, unsecured papers flying off to land on the linoleum. He turned sharp on his heel and walked into a room where the door plaque was left blank.

The thing in the bed was piebald, red on white with blood in gauze. A single dark and weathered hand draped over the hard edge of the industrial mattress was the only sign that a man was there at all. The rest: subsumed by bloodied bandages and bloodied linens, all with indeterminate beginnings and ends.

Sam's hand itched for a pencil and paper. Here was satisfaction of his visions-completion-brought around to the same place.

Dean put a hand on where he estimated Rufus's forehead to be. As he stroked, the loose knit of the gauze caught on his thick calluses and clicked with the sound of rainwater. In his mind, Sam remembered the silent fall of tears on the office carpet. The last thing he had expected to feel when seeing Rufus was _envy_.

"Rufus," Dean said. "Hey, buddy."

Rufus made a sound. It may have been Dean's name, or a plea. Maybe both.

"We're gonna get you out of here, man," Dean said. Two half-moons of unshed tears weighed at his lower eyelids, threatening to spill over the scar, but he blinked them away.

"I'll grab a gurney," Sam said.

Dean nodded, pressing a kiss to the bandages, red lips meeting a red blossom of blood and betadine solution. Sam had to turn away to avoid getting hard.

A nurse walked by him as he wheeled the gurney down the hall. Not a second glance; just as if he were the same broken figure in the chair so many weeks before, hunched over a notebook and committing fantasies to paper.

Rufus tried but failed to keep silent as Sam and Dean hoisted him from the bed. The crisp sheet snapped as Dean draped it over him, covering him head to toe as if he were already gone.

Then he took the heart monitor from the tip of his own finger. The machine's complaint was loud.

Dean's whisper was soft and low. "Go. Now."

The groaning from the back seat had been loud and unceasing, until Sam had been afraid he might go crazy. Dean seemed not to notice. He kept his eyes on the road, punishing the gas pedal. The entire car reeked of blood and antiseptic.

Now that Rufus was settled onto one of the mattresses in the office, he had quieted some. Enough to hear that his breathing was strained, each inhalation far longer than it should have been. Sam guessed at least one of his punctured lungs could not re-inflate.

"Dean," Rufus finally managed, sounding like a man talking through a laryngectomy speaking device. The smell of him, his wounds and the dressings, was beginning to permeate the air inside the office. Sam would have to liberate a blanket and pillow before sleeping in the Lincoln again.

Holding a pocket knife, Dean leaned over the supine form and held the bandages taut as he sawed through several layers. The gauze peeled away, and a new bloodstain appeared alongside the gash. "I'm going to get you some of the good stuff, my man."

"Nnh."

Dean left the room and returned with a paper cup full of his sedative concoction. Instead of trying to tip it into Rufus's mouth, he sheared the end of the cone off with the knife and held the trickling funnel over the hole he'd cut in the bandages.

It must have stung the new cut, but what was one more tiny pain to a body bent into unrecognizable shapes?

_There_, Sam thought, dismayed that the image had crept up out of nowhere. _The missing flower for Dean's sculpture._

Rufus gulped at the stream, trying to raise his head toward its source. Dean kept a hand on his forehead, unconcerned that the man was coughing back particles of amber liquid-and specks of something much darker-onto his face.

The cup drained, Rufus settled back, and almost at once fell boneless into a deep sleep, though the wheeze of his mangled lungs still echoed.

Dean stood and brushed a hand over his face. The tympanum of the graft wobbled underneath his palm as he wiped liquor and tears down his cheeks.

"Let's get out of here," he said.

Silent and pensive, Dean steered Baby through a part of the city Sam had never seen. If the neighborhood where the loft stood was a bit ramshackle, this area was blighted enough to verge on frightening. Piles of trash and blankets aggregated around the support pillars of near-empty overpasses like windblown seawater. Some of the piles moved, Sam thought, or it could have been the play of the pervasive shadows, the place too tangled for sunlight to reach.

The effect of the concrete forest was strangely soothing. Sam barely noticed when the car rumbled to a halt.

"Hey."

It was a voice Sam didn't recognize. He looked across the car, where Dean had rolled down the driver's side window.

A face swung into view: coppery skin, angles sharp enough for definition but not harshness. An attractive face, if strange.

"I'm telling you now," the man said. "It's going to be twenty-five extra for your friend there. Fifty if he does more than watch. _In advance_. He puts a finger on me, the price goes up or I bail."

"Is that…?" Sam asked.

"Yeah, pretty boy," the man said, brushing a hank of blue-black hair from his forehead and tucking it behind his ear. "A hooker. A rent boy. You footing the bill?"

Sam shook his head, stung with a violent blush, and looked away.

"I'm also out if he cries," the man said, but his tone was teasing, a mocking half-smile on his face.

"Why don't you head to the back seat, Sammy?"

"Sammy," the man drawled, causing Sam's blush to deepen. He swung around the front end of the Impala and stuck out his hand. "Spark."

"Extra twenty-five?" Sam asked, and looked at the proffered hand.

He had been serious, but Spark burst out laughing. "This one's on me. The only one."

Sam shook the man's hand, then opened the door, sliding around to the back as though Spark, true to his handle, was electrified.

The black-haired man slid into the passenger seat and held out his hand. "Hundred to start."

Dean opened his wallet, pulled out a crumpled Benjamin, and handed it over.

Spark slid his trim body down into the seat for access to the pockets of his tight jeans. "So what are we doing? Huh? You want me to blow you? You wanna blow me?"

"Do you know how to drive standard?" Dean asked.

Spark did not say anything, but from the way he had turned his head toward Dean he appeared to be serving up a withering look. Dean only smiled.

"Take your cock out," Dean said.

The man obeyed. Perhaps it was the command, or long years of conditioning, but he was already half-hard. Sam swallowed down his guilt at sneaking a look.

"Other hand on the gear shift," said Dean. "I have the clutch and the wheel. You shift when I tell you to shift. This hand," he traced a fingertip over Spark's knuckle, "doesn't leave the shifter. The other one stays on your cock. We're going for a drive."

Spark shrugged. "Easy enough."

Dean did not go easy, though. It was almost impossible to hear his barked commands ("First! Third!" "Reverse!") over the roar of the engine. Without the anchor of a seatbelt, Sam slid back and forth across the rear seat, heart pumping in time with the thrum of the Impala's pistons.

Dean drove them through the lonely and picked-over streets in exactly the way he had fucked Cas: sudden, mutable, erratic. Fierce.

They skidded to a stop with the passenger door less than a foot away from a pylon. Hard breaths played a wavebreak over the stuffy air inside the car.

"You do realize you're fucking crazy, right?" Spark said, apparently without regard for his mark's opinion of him. He let his hand slide from the gear shift, the death grip on his cock still urging the organ to hardness.

Dean grinned, sweat glistening in his hairline and easing down the runnel of his scar. "Come back to my place. I'll show you someone who's really crazy."

Sam expected Spark to spit out another number, another impossible sum, but he seemed to catch on that Dean was joking.

Dean reached over to the glove box, popped it open, and retrieved a small bottle.

Lube. Was he really going to pull a repeat of the scouting mission and fuck the guy while Sam watched?

He opened the cap, tore off the safety seal, and upended the bottle over the gear shift. Gouts of viscous fluid ran down the long shaft.

"Fuck it," Dean told Spark.

Spark sniffed, amused but unperturbed. "Uh-uh, white boy. I need two hundred extra for that shit. Kink doesn't come cheap. Not with me."

"It comes free if you give it," Dean said.

This time, Spark either missed or ignored the philosophical musing. "Wrong answer," he said, and pushed the door open. "Maybe pretty boy Sammy will give it for free. Nice to make your fucking acquaintance."

The whole car rattled as he slammed the door.

Dean sighed, but it wasn't an exasperated sound. Satisfied, rather.

"What, exactly, did you get out of that?" Sam asked.

"A demonstration," said Dean. He closed his eyes and sighed again.

Sam was about to return to the passenger seat (_God knew how Dean was going to drive with the gear shift knob lubed up_.) when he heard the slow grate of a zipper. He took a deep and shaky breath. As if mirroring the man who had just left, Dean slipped his cock free from the fly of his jeans and held it, contented.

Long minutes passed. Amid breath-filled silence, the odd car whooshed by overhead. He did not move his hand, though he stayed hard.

"Sam."'

Startled out of the lull, Sam's heart leapt hard enough in his chest that he felt it in his ears. In the rearview mirror he met Dean's eyes, one keen, one lazy with long-ago damage. Sam had to curl his hands into tight fists to keep from being knocked sideways by arousal.

"You want a taste?" Dean asked.

The words went straight to Sam's groin. He was equally sick with desire and sick with himself for wanting so badly what Dean offered.

"Meg and Cas say you might," said Dean. "I'm not so sure."

Forcing words out was harder for Sam than it had been when his throat was burned raw from the fire Jess's body fueled. Aeons ago. "You'll just string me along," he said. "Leave me hanging."

Dean averted his eyes. "I owe you one for Rufus."

"How do I know I can trust you?"

Dean grinned, lips pulled wide. "You don't. I'm pretty sure that's what you like about me. In fact, I know it is."

"I don't think you know anything about me," Sam said, shifting on the seat in a vain attempt to give his erection some relief.

"I know you want this. It's just that you can't ask, Sammy. So I'm asking for you."

Sam almost didn't feel his own body as he vaulted from the back seat and tore open the passenger side door. Blood sizzled below the surface of his skin, capillaries opening and gasping, making him feel cold all over.

He didn't even shut the door, long legs dangling into the dirty air above the street, before Dean was in his mouth. The taste was strange, jarring. He couldn't remember ever being close to another man's cock, much less sliding one between his lips.

Unabashed, Dean let his jaw drop and voiced a long, low moan that ate up the silence in the car. There were rough hands on Sam's head-petting, but not pushing or tugging. His mouth began to water in a rush, unbelievable volume. He sucked it back to his throat and tried to choke the thick spit down, which brought another cry from Dean.

"Sam," he said.

And Sam began to move, with more confidence than he had any right to expect from himself. Pushing his head down _just enough_ that Dean's cock brushed his soft palate triggered the just-shy-of-pain remembrance of the searing that had inflamed the tissue there, and drove him from hardness to agony.

Dean gave no warning before he came, and a tide that tasted like seawater washed into Sam's mouth. He gagged once, twice, and swallowed on reflex, pulling away and wiping at his lips.

Dean sat slack-jawed, chest heaving in time with the grotesque inflation and deflation of the red graft scar at his hairline. His eyes flew open, comically wide. "Fuuuuuck."

Without looking away from Dean, the violent flush on his face and the fascination at the thrumming of his scar, Sam unfastened his fly and eased his aching erection into view.

The hand Dean wrapped around it lit up Sam's entire body with pain-pleasure. He had to fight back the urge to struggle away. And then the hand was gone, replaced with warm softness. Eyes squeezed shut, Sam could not control his breathing as it fell down in hot bursts on the back of Dean's neck.

Dean did not hesitate-_god, was he good; sweet fuck was he good_-and any rational thought blew out the top of Sam's head and escaped into the hot afternoon. Still, he forced himself to open his eyes, wanting to get one look at Dean sucking his cock before he came.

It was the unmarred, the beautiful, side of Dean's face that he saw as he looked down. He slipped his fingers around to the other side, searching for the raised line of scar on Dean's closed eyelid. And that was it. Fingertips on the ridge of mangled tissue, Sam came hard.

Dean did not move right away, letting Sam go soft in his mouth. After a few moments, Sam moved one finger in a short arc across Dean's cheek.


	10. Chapter 10

The reek of impending death permeated the air of the entire loft, reaching down into the elevator well and up into the highest recesses of the grimy ceiling. It drove away any residual euphoria from the interlude with Dean, and Sam had to fight back the urge to pull the hem of his shirt up to cover his nose and mouth. All other available air seemed to have fled the loft; it had lost its stifling caul of warmth and the foul smell hung in at atmosphere so cool it brought gooseflesh to Sam's arms.

Again, Dean seemed unconcerned. The soles of his heavy boots slapping a tattoo as uneven as his face, he headed into the office while Sam lingered behind.

A drift of debris by the foot of the fender-helix passed unnoticed until it moved. There sat Castiel in his coat, in a Gethsemane of auto parts. He leveled his imperturbable gaze at Sam as though he had only been waiting to be noticed.

"Hello, Sam."

"Hey, Cas..tiel."

The first smile Sam had seen from the man appeared. "You may call me Cas. If you like."

"Okay," Sam said, able to relax a little. "Whatcha up to, Cas?"

"I am thinking about leaving. Not this company, but this place. At least for a little while."

"You and me both," Sam said, additional relief allowing him to unclench his hands and breathe a little deeper through his mouth.

"And," Cas said, appearing somewhat ashamed, "I could use a nap."

Sam had been hoping to find Meg, but he hadn't seen her since she drove away after Rufus's accident. Even strange company was better than none. "Wanna take a drive?" he asked.

Back in the Lincoln, Sam still found it difficult to get used to Cas's silent presence, his proximity. Unlike Dean, the man felt no need to comment on the scenery, the cars that passed, his grandiose, but vague, artistic aims. Weighing the stark contrast, Sam had to marvel at just how comfortable he had become with Dean's stream of manic babble.

"Thank you," Cas said, apropos of nothing.

"I needed to get out of there, too," Sam told him.

"I find…" He paused. "I find I am not altogether comfortable with the idea of death."

Before he could stop himself, Sam laughed. Seeing Cas's uncomprehending stare, he added, "Sorry. I was just thinking about what Dean would say."

"What would Dean say?"

"That you're already dead. That we all are."

"That _is_ something he would say," Cas said, then resumed watching the road.

They drove until the sun slipped below the horizon. With the day's last glow fading, Sam felt such an insistent weariness in his limbs that he could barely shift or steer. He yawned.

"We could find a hotel room," Cas said, still looking ahead through the windshield at the vanishing sunset. "To sleep. Though we can have sex if you like."

Sam was half-amused and half-appalled at Cas's deadpan candor. "Sleep sounds good," he said.

They drove until the freeway terminated and split into a pair of local roads. Sam veered left toward the business route-trucker's paths were lined with any number of no-account motels. Certain that Cas would provide no input, he chose the first one he found and pulled into the dusty parking lot of the Desert Star Inn.

The woman behind the counter wore a flowered smock the likes of which Sam had last seen on an elementary school art teacher, but her mouth was etched with deep nasolabial lines and pulled into a permanent frown.

"You two want the queen bed?" she asked, holding up an old-fashioned key attached to an outsize plastic tag.

"If you prefer-" Cas began.

"That's fine," said Sam, taking the key.

"Fifty up front," the woman told him.

Sam was struck by a sudden and vivid memory of Spark. He was about to reach for his wallet when he realized he had neither wallet nor cash. There had been no need to worry about food or lodging. Known as a bit of a health nut at Stanford-outside the secret wine binges-Sam realized that when he ate now, _if_ he ate, he grazed on the crappy fast food items that Dean laid around the office like offerings in their cradles of waxed paper.

Cas was handing over three twenties, a slight tremble in his fingers the only crack in his eerie calm.

"Thanks," Sam said.

"Have fun," the dour woman at the desk called after them.

"Let's sleep," said Sam.

"Like the dead men we are," Cas said.

Sam had to laugh.

The light switch near the door illuminated only half the room; quite the feat because it was so small. Worn carpet, the lingering smell of bleach from stiff bed linens. Still, it exuded comfort like the loft could not. Not right now. And yet, Sam found himself half-wishing it was Dean with him instead of Cas.

_Oh, well._ Rufus would only be a distraction for a little while longer. And when he was gone, Sam knew with a precise, icy certainty that it was his arms, not Cas's, that Dean would run to.

When Cas shrugged off the battered trench coat, it was the first time Sam had ever seen him without it. He looked somehow smaller, shrunken inside a white tee with a crinkled pattern of yellow staining at the armpits. This he took off as well, letting it slip down on the far side of the bed, looking away from Sam toward the bathroom.

"Oh, my god."

"Hardly," said Cas. Wide expanses of mutilated tissue cascaded from points on his shoulders and dipped below his belt line. The scar reached out ragged fingers along his upper arms and flanks-the teasing hints of which Sam had seen on the afternoon of the demolition derby. For all its ragged edges, each side of the burn seemed to mirror the other, folded across the axis of Cas's spine like a Rorschach blot. Like…_wings_.

"What happened?" Sam asked.

"From what I'm told," Cas said, "A Ford Pinto happened."

"From what you're told?"

"I don't remember anything before the accident. Not even the accident itself. When I was able to wake up, I was told that I had been lucky that the fire was contained to the back half of the car, but that the vinyl of the seat had melted into my skin by the time I was pulled out," Cas said.

The matter-of-fact narration made it seem like Cas was talking about someone else entirely, but, in truth, he may as well have been.

"So… 'able to wake up?'" Sam asked. "Were you in a coma?"

"Yes." The half-turn of his upper body toward Sam pushed some of the scar out of view. "On my own, at first. And then medically induced. I hear doctors often do so with burn victims because if they were awake, the agony would drive them mad."

The contrast between the untouched skin and the ragged claws of twisted tissue made Sam's fingertips itch with the need to touch it-the shift in texture an indulgence. Again he thought of Dean. "How long-?"

"There is no way to know. I do know that I have had sixteen surgeries and eight grafts."

Sam's heart galloped, his palms were damp. "But it doesn't hurt anymore?"

"It does," Cas said. "On and off. They call it neuralgia. It only occurs around the edges of the burn, where the tissue damage was not as severe." He gave a little laugh. "Don't you find it strange that the worse it is, the less painful it becomes? I have always found that strange."

"I think that's true for a lot of things," Sam said. "Maybe only in Dean's world."

Cas tilted his chin, eyes bright and puzzled. "Is there another world?"

Sam chuckled, hands in his pockets, scuffing his feet on the carpet.

"I feel I need to apologize for my stinginess with my salve when you first joined us, Sam," Cas said, frowning. "It is hard to come across, and I do find it helps." Cas shucked his jeans and stood in plain white boxers.

"You don't have to apologize," Sam told him. He wanted to explain, to justify further, but he couldn't find the words.

Cas sat on the edge of the bed, hands splayed on the scratchy spread and head half-turned like a virgin bride. Sam couldn't tell if his aim was coquettish or clueless, but the effect was the same. Desire boiled in his gut and made the room, with its limping air conditioner, seem even warmer.

"Could I ask you to help me apply some?" Cas asked. "You can find it in my left coat pocket."

Hesitation a thing for another life-long gone-Sam agreed.

Cas lowered himself with extreme care on the bed, face down, as though the burns were still fresh.

The scent of the balm, rather than calling up memories of Rufus and the stench of his living rot crawling into every corner of the loft, sent Sam into a haze reminiscent of his own lazy descent into the unconsciousness brought on by Dean's narcotic brew.

Sam knelt on the bed and swung his leg over to straddle Cas's hips. The scars rippled as they slid across his field of vision, the flicker of a zoetrope. Salve warm on his fingers, Sam traced the ragged border between the destroyed and the untouched skin-the full perimeter, memorizing. Cas tensed then relaxed, both wanting and avoiding the touch. The play of muscles below the scar, now so much closer to the skin's surface, made Sam giddy. He was terrified if he let his hands linger he might come without even unbuttoning his jeans.

"It hurts," said Cas.

Until that point, Sam had not realized he was grinding into the "v" on Cas's lower back where the periphery of the burn broke in a smear over unmarred flesh.

"Don't stop," Cas said, more softly.

Half out of pity and half seeking relief, Sam stood, balancing on the edge of the sagging mattress and slid off his jeans and boxers. Cas writhed when he felt the weight of Sam's cock on his back. Sam lowered his full weight, knees bent under him, and the twining scars on his legs stretched with the dry ache of winter-blasted skin.

Without concern for reserving the precious balm, Sam dipped out nearly a handful of the stuff and began warming it between his palms. Cas gasped when Sam placed his hands over his scapulae, the twin blades of bone rising and wrinkling the skin between them into a canyon of erratic geography. His hands were broad, but the scars broader still, enveloping them from heel to fingertip. Sam drew in a sharp breath and closed his eyes to dampen the surge of arousal.

He bent, placed a kiss at the nape of Cas's neck, where feathers of dark hair trailed down to brush the upper limits of the scar. With a long exhale, Sam moved up toward the head of the bed and tucked his knees under Cas's arms. Wherever his skin touched the scar, it slid along the corrugated flesh on a thick layer of salve, very nearly begging the shallow thrusts that Sam could not help but make.

Cas tensed again, shoulderblades rising and pulling in toward one another.

"Stay there," Sam said. "Don't move. Please."

He slid his cock into the slick fissure of flesh at Cas's spine, and pressed his palm over it, creating a tunnel of scalding warmth. Sam let his head fall back and desire take over, pushing long thrusts into the orifice he had created. Each press of his hips forced the air from Cas's lungs; he breathed a growing wet stain onto the pillowcase.

But he did not complain, did not ask to stop.

"Sam," he whispered, mouth red and wet.

Sam ground his teeth and came, washing over Cas's nape and anointing his shoulders. He slipped away, tumbling onto the far side of the bed with a tremor that whipped through the matrix of bedsprings.

"Cas," he said, struggling to find breath, scratching pale skin with ragged nails in the fumbling rush to push the boxers away. "Come here."

Sam hauled on the man's biceps, fingers pressing new agony into the stippled skin there. Cas bared his teeth and let his head roll forward. Sam brought him upright to straddle his waist; he opened his eyes slowly, vivid blue and staring at the space above the headboard.

"Touch yourself," said Sam. In his head, he heard Dean speak the words.

Rather than watching Cas's hand, his motions, Sam watched his face-now crushed with concentration, now open in bald ecstasy. When Cas bit his lip, Sam felt the warm rush of fluid over his sternum, reaching cooling fingers into the hollow of his throat.

Cas fell forward, a slow arc, fitting himself into Sam's wide embrace.

The smell of him that rose through the scent of the ointment was strange. In the back of his mind, Sam gave a moment of absent thought to the fact that he hadn't had a proper shower in what was probably weeks. But the weight of Cas pressed him into the bed, unfamiliar scents filling his nostrils.

His thumbs alongside the lettuce-edge of Cas's scars, stroking, his mind drifted, reclaiming its haze. Through it broke one thing, and one thing only-a razor recognition.

_Dean._

_Dean._

Though he woke with full sun slicing through the curtains, Sam couldn't pin down the time if he tried. They could have slept for hours or days. A warm finger of light bisected the sleeping body next to him, stopping just short of touching Sam's skin. He lay and stared for a moment at the washing glow that flowed like a sheet up to Cas's chin, leaving his face in relative shadow. As if he felt Sam's gaze, Cas shifted into the light, eyes still closed, bringing the circular scars studding his forehead into relief.

Ignoring the unwashed reek that rose from the sheets as he shifted and the flaking remnants of the night's activities, Sam bent to press cracked lips to each scar. His was a removed tenderness, almost paternal. If anyone made it out of the maelstrom that was Dean's grand design, he hoped it was Cas. Dean was right-he was an innocent. Not ensnared as the rest of them were, but falling, turning end over end. A hapless Alice tilted into a rabbit hole he could never comprehend. If he were as delicate as he seemed, his landing would be harshest of them all.

It wasn't the kisses but Sam's fingertips pressed to the purplish marks that woke Cas. Where Sam had expected confusion in the blue eyes, there was only recognition. It served to undermine his theories about Cas's aimless trajectory.

"They call it a halo," Cas said.

The statement startled a laugh out of Sam. "Dean does?"

"No. Real doctors do. The device that made these marks. For injuries to the cervical spine. Pins are screwed directly into the skull."

"They still use those?" Sam asked.

"Perhaps only on me," Cas said, with a sliver of smile. He flicked with one fingernail at a patch of dried semen clinging to the plane of Sam's left pectoral.

The twinge of discomfort roused Sam from the swift-coming dream state attending a warm bed and warm company. Cas's next comment split the mood altogether, and the sudden invasion of stuffy closeness made the smell of their unwashed bodies billow into the room.

"Rufus is dead," he said.

There was no point in disagreeing, so Sam only nodded. If it was not fact, it would be soon enough.

"He got in the way," Cas said, with unusual enmity. "He was unpredictable."

"And Dean isn't?" Sam asked.

This brought a genuine laugh. "No. Dean is a simple man of simple expectations. And in that way he is pure. There is no 'before' or 'after.' Only the moment in which he lives."

"Like you."

"Not exactly. My memory begins with my fall," Cas said. "Dean does not fall. He hovers."

Sam could sense the truth of it, even couched in the convoluted metaphors.

"It makes him easier to see," Cas said. "To examine. You...I have never seen."

"What do you mean?"

"I…" he paused. "Here I see your body. But unlike the rest of us, you are not only your scars."

The comment pushed an inexplicable barb of hurt into Sam, and he bit his lip to keep a neutral expression.

"I believe you are kinetic," said Cas, staring at the ceiling. "And Dean does. It is no wonder he wants to hold on."

"To me?"

"He is the axle, we are the spokes," said Cas, using a comparison Sam felt could have been plucked nearly word-for-word from his head. "But you are the motion."

Sam frowned. Could he be outside even among outsiders? The worst of it was not being able to tell whether he was more upset by the idea that Dean couldn't hold onto him or that he was what held the two of them together.

"It disturbs you," said Cas, mimicking Sam's expression. "I have never been good with words."

"No," Sam said. "You're fine." A lie. He shook his head, inviting the fog back in rather than trying to clear it. "I'm going to take a shower."

Both of them clean and shirtless, as t-shirts washed under the shower dangled from the Lincoln's seatbelt stays, Sam and Cas drove back until the skyline swallowed the mountains once again. Everything was city-dry and hot and harsh within the shroud of dust-thickened air.

Meg was standing outside the loft, dressed in a black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, and jean shorts cut off just below the swell of her ass. With her wild bleach-blonde hair spiked upward and eyes hidden behind huge sunglasses, she struck Sam both as a comforting presence and as one entirely unknown-familiar skin sculpted into dangerous terrain as if she were slated to fill the spot abandoned by Rufus.

She gave a knowing but guarded smile when Sam and Cas unfolded their clean, broad expanses of skin from within the car.

"Where's Dean?" Sam asked.

"At the salvage yard," said Meg. "Getting my car."

"Your car?"

"The Lexus, yes."

"It's not driveable," Sam said. "Is it?"

"Dean took chains and a hitch. He thinks it'll make the perfect ship for Rufus's send-off."

"A piece of art," Sam said. "An installation."

Meg nodded. "I'm glad to be rid of it. The thing was ridiculous. Padded like a prison, fitted out with stupid devices in the name of safety. We both know how well those worked. It's no use trying to cut off contact. The car will find the road, and the road will find you."

Where she might have rolled her eyes at Dean's pronouncements before the derby, she was beginning to sound just like him now. Sam wanted to grab her, crush her flesh to bruising below his fingertips, fuck the words out of her throat.

"When did Rufus die?" Cas asked.

Meg didn't answer.

"What about the other car?" Sam asked. "Lucifer."

"Ask Dean yourself," Meg said.

The belching growl of Baby's engine was doubled in intensity as it fought with all its horses behind it to drag the wreck of the Lexus. The rear wheels were serviceable, and Dean had hoisted the annihilated front end high enough with a length of chain wrapped around Baby's rear fender to drag it back to the loft.

Sam could see the fender buckling, pinched inward where the chain bit down, but for once Dean didn't seem to care at all. Whatever Rufus had meant to him Sam wasn't privileged to know, and it rankled.

Dean's face was haggard in the sunlight, his eyes bloodshot and puffy. The damaged eyelid drooped, making a slit of his eye as though it had been sealed shut with a hard right hook.

"We have to carry him out," he said, voice thick with phlegm.

Meg, Cas, and Sam followed silently into the loft. Most of the sick-smell had dissipated. Sam imagined it thinning bit by bit as Rufus's organs shut down one at a time. But as the elevator rose, he saw that some of the windows had been broken, fresh air whistling past the glass teeth even in the morning's relative stillness.

The helix of fenders lay on its side, and bits of chrome from the skeletal Chevy were snapped apart and tossed all over the concrete floor. Sam's discomfort burrowed bone-deep in an instant. This vandalism, even more than Rufus's death, was a telltale for ruin, for rot from within. Regardless of circumstance, Sam felt responsible for it. The light wind skimmed his naked skin, making him shiver.

The office was still clotted with stench; even Dean made no pretense at hiding disgust.

The bandage-covered form that had been Rufus lay in a boneless heap on a mattress speckled with stains turning black. If his humanity was nearly erased by the blood-soaked dressings, death had finished the job.

"Take the whole mattress," Dean said. "It'll burn better."

A burning "ship." That was Dean, theatrical to a fault. Rufus would have a Viking funeral, however bastardized.

Each of them grabbed a corner of the mattress, sodden and sagging with dead weight, and wrestled it across the loft and into the elevator. Inside the garage, they folded the mattress over on itself with the body inside and secured it with ropes. The bed springs moaned.

The four of them loaded the bundle through the ruined rear window of the Lexus, secured it to the crushed frame and covered the whole thing with a dirty blue tarp.

Dean patted the end of the mattress beneath its plastic overwrap. "I'll take you, buddy." He did not look up. "Sam, grab the gas can in the garage. It's time to sail."

Dragging the Lexus, Dean led the procession of cars-Sam and Cas in the Lincoln and Meg bringing up the rear in the Mercedes-with proper funerary slowness. It was hard to tell whether the weight of the car he pulled or the weight of the loss dragged Dean to a crawl on the long drive to the desert. The roads grew progressively smaller and more poorly maintained the further outside city limits they drove. The sun hung low and gold over the city, and Sam knew then that Dean hoped to lose the fire in the last blaze of sunset. An offering to a greater purpose.

When Dean popped the straining padlock on the chain supporting the Lexus, it dropped at once and settled with a sigh onto a destroyed front tire.

Sam didn't need a cue to fetch the gas can from the trunk of his car and begin dousing the mattress and the car's interior. It was clear Dean was there to stand at watch. Sam poured a trickling path leading away from the car, and Meg offered her lighter.

The two of them staggered back as the fire slapped the oxygen out of the surrounding air. Cas and Dean stood steady, owing to their kinship with flame, Sam guessed. So much for camouflage in the red of sundown; the car sent a column of black smoke straight up into the unmoving desert air.

It must have smelled the same when Jess's body burned in the car, but Sam couldn't remember. The reek of broiling flesh and sizzling blood mixed with the chemical horror of the burning interior made tears spill over and cut trails through the ash on their faces.

Had Dean turned around, it would have looked like mourning. But he stared only at the fire. As the roof caved in on bending steel, sinking the remains of the mattress and body almost out of view, Dean snapped out of his stupor and jogged to his car. The howl of tires rose over the sounds of the dying fire, and twin plumes of dust blew over it, a few specks igniting in tiny pyrotechnic bursts.

This time, Meg did not drive away. She followed close to the Lincoln all the way back to the loft, where full dark had taken over. A guttering streetlight a block away played over the smashed glass on the building's face.

Meg threaded her fingers through Cas's and pulled him close to whisper, her lips brushing his ear. Cas gave a backward glance toward Sam, but the idea of going up into the loft was still nauseating.

Sam shook his head. Instead he sat on the Lincoln's hood, putting on Cas's shirt and then his own for warmth, watching the two of them disappear into the murk of the garage.

If not for the reflection of the faraway light on jagged glass, Sam would not have seen the figure in brief silhouette on top of the building. Shielding his eyes, he let them grow accustomed to a darkness that was barely interrupted by weak starlight, until he could see the outline once again.

"Hey, Sammy." The greeting floated down through the complete silence of the street.

Sam slid off the hood and walked, listening to the gravel shifting with each step. On the far side of the building was a fire escape. It was intact all the way to the roof level, but shrieked under Sam's boots, splitting the silence. He wondered whether Cas and Meg heard through the office wall, or whether their sad and careful fucking had already gulped down all sound but their breath.

It was a relief when Sam pulled himself up to the tarpaper roof. He followed discarded clothes like trail markers-shoes, a shirt, jeans, boxers-to where Dean crouched, naked, looking out to the city's edge. No traces of smoke were visible in the deep night.

"Dean," Sam said.

He stood. As Sam put a hand on his shoulder, shocked at the coolness of his skin, he saw in the wan light his hair standing on end. Each one, all over Dean's body, except for the burned spots where hair had been blasted away.

Sam wanted to pull off one of the shirts he wore and drape it around Dean's shoulders, but the incredible landscape of his skin beckoned too strongly. He let his other hand drop down onto the graft scars and was hit by a rush of vertigo that pushed him, wavering, against Dean's body. The scars were warm, thermoclines running through cold skin.

Sam caught his breath before he spoke. "I'm sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about," Dean said. "Of everybody, he was with me the longest. Rufus, then Cas, then Meg. And you. Like there's some kind of order."

"Cas is afraid of dying."

Dean laughed. "Cas will never die. He's immortal. Are you?"

"Immortal?"

"Afraid of dying."

After a pause, Sam said, "I don't think about it."

"I think about it all the time," Dean said. "It feels good. I've died more times than I can count."

Sam laughed, the warm breath of it stirring the hairs at Dean's nape. He put his arms around Dean, gingerly, as if he would shatter himself like one of his statues.

"Check that out," Dean said, tilting his head upward against Sam's shoulder.

Sam nodded into Dean's neck, suddenly desperate to breathe in a lifetime of him in just a few minutes.

"Reminds me of a story I heard," Dean said. "A story from Africa. I think my dad told it to me."

It was the first time Dean had mentioned family outside of the crew he had assembled, and Sam was taken aback.

"This guy in the story, he killed someone he wasn't supposed to," said Dean. "And the gods exiled him. They exiled him to Heaven for a year. Except in this story, Heaven was shitty. Like there was no atmosphere, and he had to walk around in the wind nonstop. The sun burned him, and the moon did, too. And get this: the stars could talk, but all they did was tell him what a fuckup he was."

"That's weird."

"Yeah. When I was a kid, I still used to climb out on the roof and try to listen to the stars."

Sam placed a kiss at the crook of Dean's neck. "What did they say?"

"Nothing," said Dean. "Not a fucking thing."

Sam turned Dean in his arms. He was no longer crying, but his eyes were swollen from the acrid smoke of the fire. Sam traced the perimeter of the graft on Dean's forehead, feeling for the first time its fragility. He followed the scar's path with his forefinger across Dean's face and down to the point that it disappeared just below his ear.

Then he bent and put his lips against Dean's, and felt the tremors of his teeth chattering behind them. Sam held him until the knocking stopped and the night was still again.


	11. Chapter 11

By the time Sam coaxed a freezing Dean back into his clothes and into the loft, it was near sunrise and hardly warmer inside than out. They both sought refuge in the office. Meg was gone again, but Cas lay on one of the mattresses, blanketed by his coat, his dirty bare feet sticking out below the hem. The smells of sex and death were so tightly woven within the confined space that it was difficult for Sam to believe the two had ever been distinct.

Dean tipped his head with a half-faced smile toward Cas, who breathed in soft snores.

_It would be better if he stayed that way. Just never woke up._ The thought might have been appalling to Sam if it had stuck, rather than slipped in and then out of his mind like a runnel of water.

"I'm starving," Dean said, raising his hands toward the ceiling. He was rewarded with a satisfying crack from his lower back. "And I'd punch my brother for a coffee right now."

"You have a brother?" Sam asked.

Dean only smiled, snagging a denim work shirt from a hook by the far wall.

The two of them stood there a moment, everything unsaid the night before hanging between them, but easily, with no real need to pluck it down.

Then Dean said, "You coming?"

"No. No, thanks, man. I think I'll try to sleep."

Dean's face was unreadable. "Yeah," he said. "Keep Cas company. Looks like Meg did a number on him last night." He puffed out a short breath, but Sam couldn't tell if it was closer to a laugh or a sigh because Dean was already walking out the office door.

Before he dropped out of sight, he turned back, lit blue in the predawn. "The only things we have are the things we make," he said. "But you have to be ready to give them up. Don't forget that, Sammy."

Then he was gone.

Sam cast a glance toward the water cooler, hit by a single second's longing to down a cup and sink out of consciousness, let the wheel of his mind run without him for a little while. Instead, he grabbed a blanket and walked over to where Cas lay, intending to drape it over him. Cas's brow furrowed and he shifted. The pale shoulder that slipped into view was hash-marked with the red paths of sharp fingernails. There was black scabbing at the edges of his burn scar.

Sam dropped the blanket, staggered away. His legs gave out just as they had when he was starting to learn to use them again, and he tumbled backward onto the couch behind him, wings of dust unfurling from behind his back.

The thought returned. _Better if he doesn't wake up._ As if Cas's slight injuries, earned by inferior pleasure, somehow put the ones that had killed Rufus to shame.

Sam did not know how long he sat there, watching Cas breathe, imagining the scars below the coat blooming and folding like a bellows of bloodless rents. It seemed far too early for Dean to be back when he heard the squeal of the elevator.

The loft was less of an echo chamber with some of its windows broken, but the quick and stabbing steps could not be mistaken for those of anyone else. Meg.

She wore black heels and a red dress, the cocktail-party incongruity even more emphatic in the drab surroundings of the office.

"Is Dean still playing gargoyle?" she asked.

"Huh?"

"The _roof_, Sam. Is he still on the roof?"

Sam shook his head. "He's getting breakfast." He nodded toward the door to the bedroom area, toward Cas. "What did you do to him?"

"Nothing he didn't ask for," Meg said. With a femme fatale move straight out of a black and white movie, she pulled a rolled brochure from her cleavage and slapped it onto the desk-the same desk on which Dean had cut off Sam's casts, a lifetime ago. "I found Crowley," she said.

Sam heaved to his feet and lurched toward the desk, hand outstretched, but Meg snatched the paper out of his reach.

"What the fuck, Meg?"

"This is Dean's endgame," she said.

"I thought we were all in it," Sam said. "I thought we all had a part."

"Yeah? What's your part?"

"What's his?" He swung his arm toward Cas, a deflection.

Meg sniffed, but she did return the paper to the desk.

Sam flattened it out between his hands, resisting the urge to raise the document to his nose, search for traces of Meg's perfume. To show her he wasn't gone.

The green lettering read, "Healing Oasis Retreat."

"The rehab facility?" Sam asked.

Meg nodded. "There was a fucking Maserati in front of the building. If I had to guess, I'd say agent. Or publicist. Either way, he's about to get on the move." A small glimmer of excitement crossed her face.

"What do we do?"

Her expression went hard and opaque again. "I need to talk to Dean."

Dean was gone for more than two hours. He came back with a grease-smeared mouth and a shit-eating grin. The coffee he handed Sam was cold and stale, but he still drank it. Meg waved it away when he offered her the styrofoam cup.

Sam swung out of the chair he sat in and headed toward the bedroom, tamping down annoyance. If Meg needed her time with Dean, so be it. Sam had spent the cold night warming Dean, drinking him in. In Sam's arms, Dean felt like two people-almost too large to contain-one scabbed over with trauma of his own making, though Sam was sure he could never pin down the catalyst. The other was balanced on the edge of the scars, hesitant to spill over if it meant letting slip its corona of softness.

Cas had been wrong. Dean was moving, only it was inside himself. He was looking for the defining injury to break him open and spill him free.

As if he had heard, Cas opened his eyes as Sam walked through the doorway. Maybe it was the questions in his own head, but Sam thought he read a query in that blank gaze, and it was too much at the moment. He turned on his heel and walked out toward the open loft instead. If Meg or Dean looked up as he passed, he didn't notice.

Behind the wheel of the Lincoln, it took Sam nearly an hour of road time to realize he was crisscrossing the city in the pattern of his arrival. Out to Northern Nevada Regional, under the Reno Arch. To the salvage yard. Winding through the overpass-darkened landscape where they had picked up Spark and on toward the desert, though he couldn't bring himself even to think about searching out the burnt remains of Meg's Lexus. Of Rufus.

And finally back to the loft. The center of his world.

When he arrived, both Dean and Meg were gone.

Meg came back near sunset. In her own car. The sour look on her face telegraphed dissatisfaction. More than that, she looked _un_satisfied. Sam didn't even bother to attempt feeling bad about it.

Inside the office, Meg removed her shirt, bra, and skirt. As usual, she wore no panties.

As she undressed, Sam searched her body for scars. It was unblemished, beautiful-full in some places and lithe in others. The motley bruises were gone, and Sam found himself unable to recover the wild attraction he had felt for her when her skin still remembered the accident.

In any case, Meg was not here for Sam. She took Cas by the hand again and led him into the bedroom without bothering to close the door.

Silent on the couch, Sam watched them fuck-Meg with her thighs on either side of Cas's head at first, pinning his wrists to the mattress and grinding down onto his mouth, and then as she rode him. When Cas tried to place his hands on her hips, she slapped his face.

Sam closed his eyes.

Dean didn't come back that night.

Or the next day.

In the late afternoon of the third day, Sam heard Baby's whining rumble drifting up through the broken windows. He sat up, ran a hand through his hair, fussing like a nervous prom date. Dean's arrival had roused him from his indolence, had given the day its accustomed urgency once again. Meg and Cas, sequestered within their sex-drowsy bubble, perked up at the sound.

When Sam exited the office and stood by the window, ducking to avoid the jagged, reaching fingers of sunburned glass, he saw Dean standing outside, leaning against Baby's hood. Dean smiled, the left side trailing the right as usual. He held up his hands, not a greeting but an offering. Both of his palms were stained black.

Sam turned and headed toward the elevator.

Dean was scrubbing his hands with Fast Orange cleanser, absent any water, when Sam walked out to meet him. Whipping the end of a roll of paper towels so quickly the entire tube fell from the shelf and unrolled across the floor, Dean winked at Sam, who stepped in to tear off two or three sheets and hand them to Dean.

The paper pulled up black grit and pushed an artificial citrus smell toward Sam.

"Where were you?" Sam asked.

"Damn. What are you, my dad?" Dean said, the smile falling from his face.

Sam's heart leapt into his throat.

"I'm just fucking with you," Dean laughed. "It's not like my dad gave a shit about what I did or where I went."

"You too, huh?"

Dean sniffed, looking away only for a second as if pulling himself from the brink of a memory. "C'mon, Sammy," he said. "Let's go for a drive."

"Where are you going?" Meg said from behind them. Sam hadn't even heard the elevator.

"Jesus," Dean said. "What is this, the fucking Inquisition?"

Meg crossed her arms. Her hair was flattened on one side, her eye makeup drifting downward into the cradles below her eyes. She wore one black pump and one red.

"I've got something I need to show Sam," Dean told her.

"Crowley is moving out soon," Meg said.

"Soon," Dean said. "Not now." He gestured with his chin toward the elevator.

"Whatever." Meg shook her head and walked away. The slight difference in heel height gave her a ghost of the limp she once had.

Sam followed Dean outside to the Impala.

Sam knew the city well enough now to recognize the route to the salvage yard. He'd driven it himself the other day, as if in a moment of prescience.

The razor wire-topped gates were closed, but Dean hopped out and hauled them open, the useless chain and padlock clanking and swinging. With the windows open to collect the hints of coolness from the approaching evening, the familiar crunch of gravel was amplified in Sam's ears.

He saw the car as soon as Dean got close to the shadow of the overpass. Lucifer was parked in sunlight now, but almost nullified the rays-a car-shaped black hole.

Dean cut the engine, raising his eyebrows at Sam and grinning.

When he got out of the car, Sam could see the finish a little better. It was not a waxed shine, but a subtle, almost ridged glow. Like a beetle's wing. "You finished it."

Dean was fairly dancing in his boots. "What do you think?"

"This is what you were doing the last couple of days?" Sam asked.

"Bingo. Come on. Fucking gorgeous, right?"

Sam nodded, cautious, circling around the bumper and its twin curling horns of chrome.

"It's for you," Dean said. "I finished him for you."

"I thought it was for Rufus."

Dean laughed. Even the sound seemed to sink into the depths of the car, swirl and disappear. "It's for you," he repeated. "It was always for you. I just didn't know it."

Sam frowned. "I don't know what to say." The car-the gift-hid a kernel of finality. Sam's body and mind rebelled against it.

Dean sidled up behind him, reached one arm around Sam's shoulder and dangled a set of keys with a cheap pewter skull keychain attached. "Say, 'Thank you, Dean.'"

"Thank you, Dean."

"Now hold out your hand."

Sam paused, then raised his hand, uncurling his fingers. The keys thumped into his palm, lifeless.

Dean slapped his open hand against Sam's chest twice, hard enough to drive a puff of air from his lungs. "Let's go," he said. "We're going to do this town right."

Sam slipped the keys to Lucifer into his jeans pocket and got back in the car beside Dean. They drove east, pillowed by sunset. As the sky bled into the car, Sam could pick out the fine hairs on Dean's knuckles, upright within the lazy drape of his fingers over the steering wheel.

Sam reached over and switched on the radio, but flinched when jangling guitars blared in deafening fanfare from the speakers. He spun the volume knob.

"No, no," Dean said. "Turn it up. I fucking love this song." Instead of waiting for Sam, he cranked the volume again. "You know this one, right?" he yelled.

Sam got only a flicker of recognition.

Dean began to bop his head with the giddy enthusiasm of a teenager out on his first solo drive, slapping his palms against the wheel in time with the drums.

"Come on, man! You know the words!"

It was more shouting than singing, off-key but impassioned.

"_Home in the darkness,  
home on the highway,  
Home isn't my way,  
Home I'll never be._"

Sam finally remembered the tune when the chorus kicked in. Blue Öyster Cult's "Burnin' for You." He smiled while Dean jumped in his seat like a marionette.

"_Burn out the day,  
Burt out the night…_"

"Come on, Sammy!" _I can't see no reason to put up a fight…_" Dean looked over at him, expectant.

Sam mouthed the words. "_I'm livin' for givin' the devil his due…_"

"Yeah!" Dean shouted. "Fuck yeah."

And they sang together, knocking out self-consciousness with sheer volume.

"_And I'm burnin', I'm burnin', I'm burnin' for you._"

_I'm burnin', I'm burnin', I'm burnin' for you…_

Dean laughed and smashed the accelerator.

If not for the interruption of the DJ informing them that this was Reno's home for classic rock, they may not have heard the squeal of brakes and the crunch of metal.

Dean fairly twisted the radio knob off, his senses elevated to high alert. "Let's go," he whispered, anxious as a jailbreaker.

They found the car two blocks up by following a short spray of broken glass into the square of shadow below a busted light pole. The small sedan, late model but fairly plain, had spun and leapt a curb, hitting the streetlamp at the juncture between the front and back passenger doors.

Dean wrenched the key out and sprang out his door with Sam following behind.

In the driver's seat was a young woman, blonde, wearing a pink velour tracksuit top. Her car had steering column airbags, but no curtain airbags, and she had knocked her head against the seatbelt stay to her left. Blood from her lacerated scalp ran down the cascade of her hair and stained her shoulder in a dark epaulet.

As the front airbag deflated, her face-eyes closed, mouth open-lit up blue. The hand in her lap held a cell phone, its screen cracked and unreadable but still putting out a fractured glow.

Dean shook his head. "Texting and driving. You should know better," he said, reaching out to stroke the girl's head as if she were a sleeping child.

"Is she breathing?" Sam asked.

"Yeah. Just knocked out."

"Do you think-"

"Let it go for a little bit," Dean said. "I want you to see this." He went back to the car and fetched something from the glove box.

Sam heard the little door snap shut in the sudden hush of the night. There was no hiss of steam or radiator fluid; the accident hadn't been bad, only inopportune. They heard only the trickle of glass shards like water onto the cement, and the moaning settle of the car's contorted frame. Reinvented in an instant.

"It's a shame to take her out," said Dean. "But they will." He clicked on the small LED flashlight he held and played it over the rim of the intact driver's side window. Tiny drops of blood on the inside of the glass seized the light and threw it back at Sam's eyes in a web-shaped retina burn of bright red. His finger hovering just above the pane, Sam traced the line of a thin loop of the girl's hair that swept uncaring through the fine spray.

Beside him, Dean sighed.

The passenger window was broken; Sam could hear the crunch of glass underneath Dean's boots as he made his way around the front of the car. In his uneven grasp, the light danced in erratic patterns over the passenger seat. He stopped and trained the beam on a flash of gold.

A tawdry clutch purse of quilted gold vinyl still lay in the emergency brake well, its chain strap woven once or twice around the brake handle.

Dean gaped like a treasure hunter, handing the light off to Sam and reaching in to free the little handbag. The chain swept another fall of glass onto the tops of Dean's boots as he pulled out his find.

He opened the bag. "Lip gloss," he said, tossing it to the ground. "Tampon." He smirked at Sam. "License." Dean flicked the ID like a playing card from the tips of his fingers without even examining it. The loose cash inside he pocketed.

Sam said nothing, only watched as Dean leaned back against the car, blocking the girl from sight. He unbuckled his belt and unzipped his jeans, bringing an erection Sam hadn't even noticed out into the cooling night.

Sam couldn't decide if he was more turned on by the sight of Dean's arousal or by the fact that it was caused by the accident. Not the girl, or her vulnerable state, but the happenstance aesthetic of the crash itself. Nothing else in the manmade world created such spontaneous beauty, and it seemed only Dean could hold it in his hand, channel it through himself.

Chest tight and fingertips burning for even a little contact, Sam shifted and watched Dean languidly stroke his cock while folding his spine into the curve of the broken-out window. A siren sounded in the distance.

"Dean…"

Eyes still closed, Dean opened the purse and tightened his hand. "Say it again," he told Sam.

"...Dean?"

Dean came with a grunt, filling the stained inner pocket of the girl's handbag. The breath left Sam's lungs until the spasms had subsided. He had never seen another man ejaculate, and to do so under such surreal circumstances… Still, it felt more like completion than violation. Fluids mingling, entering the car and insinuating into its hidden places, an inaccessible memory.

Panting, sated, Dean closed the magnetic clasp of the purse and replaced it gently on the passenger seat. The light from the girl's cell phone had died out, and Sam could see neither breath nor blood within the cavern of the car.

Another siren joined the first. Without a word, they went back to Baby.

Dean could only drive a few blocks before he pulled into the shadow beside a looming concrete pillar. The light from a single streetlight splintered his face into panes of black and gold.

"What was that?" Sam asked.

"It was just what you saw," he said. "Except you're seeing it with different eyes."

"The ones I got in the wreck," Sam said.

"That's right," Dean said. "You don't know until you do."

"Meg said something like that."

Dean waved his hand, dismissive, his head falling back against the headrest. "She's not here." The movement abrupt, he sat up and looked Sam in the eyes. "I want us to take a trip."

"With Meg?"

"Nope," Dean said. "Just you and me." He lifted his hips for access to his front pocket, and pulled out a small foil packet. Folded inside were two blue tablets. He grinned. "You and me and Molly."

Sam blurted it out so fast he couldn't keep the incredulity from his voice. "Ecstasy?"

"Don't be a cunt, Sammy." Dean reached over and ruffled his hair.

Sam shook him away. "I'm not a kid, Dean. I've just never done it."

"Well, then. You're in for a treat," said Dean. He pinched one of the tablets between his thumb and forefinger and lowered it onto his tongue, wiggling it a couple of times before he tipped his head back and dry swallowed. Sam watched his throat work, the adam's apple moving through golden two-day stubble.

Then he tipped the packet up over his mouth and the second pill dropped onto his tongue.

"Don't kill yourself," Sam said.

"This one's for you." Dean reached over, curling his hand behind Sam's neck and pulling him forward until their lips met. Without a moment's thought, Sam opened up and let Dean kiss the tablet into his mouth. It seemed like so long-_so long_ since he had kissed somebody like this-deeply, an inarticulate grab for unutterable feelings.

He swallowed the pill, took Dean's lower lip gently between his teeth. The drug had yet to take effect, but anticipation made Sam's heart stutter and his hands tremble.

Dean had his hands on either side of Sam's face, one rough thumb clicking back and forth over the raised spot where the windshield glass lay embedded in Sam's skin, as if the point were a new erogenous zone.

And _god_ it felt that way. The blood whirring through Sam's veins plunged into his cock.

He must have made a sound, because Dean whispered into his mouth, "Yeah. Come up with me."

The words were a balm to Sam's nerves, even if it was only a lull before the torrent swept down. He leaned in again. Kissing Dean, the contrast of textures was indulgent. Scraping hands and scraping beard, soft lips and Dean's silky hair between his fingers.

Sam took a handful of that hair with one hand and cupped Dean's chin with the other, and began to place a series of light kisses along the facial scar, tracing its path from ear to forehead with soft punctuation. He felt the needy press of his cock against his fly as he laid his lips on the thin graft and felt Dean's heart flutter beneath it. Then his own head was yanked back, and Dean smiled into the skin of Sam's throat before the tender press of lips against each of the marks that dotted Sam's face.

Crushing the fabric of Dean's shirt in his fists and pulling until the seams groaned and snapped, Sam pulled the shirt over Dean's head and tossed it into the Impala's back seat. The gnarled spread of his burn was a revelation-not hidden or hinted at but on full display and open to Sam's touch. Struck once again by the thought that two Deans wrestled under the flesh below his palms, Sam pushed Dean backward against the door and pressed his open mouth to the pebbled section of graft winding underneath Dean's pectoral. He wanted to cover every inch of the scar with his tongue. He licked the flesh until his mouth went dry then returned to kiss Dean again and again to soothe the ache, to taste him.

When Sam closed his mouth over a tendril of scar on Dean's wrist and bit into the healthy flesh on either side, Dean said, "Take off your clothes."

"Yes," Sam said. He peeled off his shirt and eased back to get his pants off. Dean pulled at the legs of Sam's jeans, whipping them off and tossing them over the headrest behind him. He dove in toward Sam's groin, but only allowed a breath to brush over Sam's aching cock. Instead, he set to the task of trailing his tongue across the network of scars along Sam's thighs and calves. They were uneven, pink, some of them still bearing the pinpoint pattern of sutures.

Sam arched up off the seat. Dean's mouth was boiling hot, setting trails of fire along the welts. Sam gritted his teeth, pushed away the mental image of flames whipping up the line of gasoline toward Rufus's pyre. When the palm he brushed over Dean's head felt like it was knotted in thorny vines, he knew the drug had kicked in.

Dean rose, kneeling in his seat and clawing at his belt buckle. "I have to get these off."

If Sam could feel each seam in the vinyl seat pinching his skin, the rough denim must have been agony for Dean. Boots, jeans, boxers, socks, all went into the footwell or onto the back seat. The light curled around Dean's naked body in ways Sam might have said were impossible. He wanted to brush the flecks of gold away before the light claimed Dean for its own, but Dean was moving, flickering, shining-slippery in his arms. Ragged scales of light grew over his lips and Sam kissed them until they shattered and fell away.

When Dean brushed the hair from Sam's shoulder and sunk his teeth into the flesh of his neck, Sam saw the coronal glow ringing the gear shift ornament. He remembered Spark, the cane-his dream eons ago in the hospital. He pulled away from Dean's wet mouth and fumbled for the catch of the glove box. It dropped open, gaping. The bottle of lube was still slippery, and it evaded Sam's fingertips once or twice, his hands further confounded by Dean's lips and tongue dragging warm-cool trails across his skin.

Sam popped the cap and dragged Dean toward him, their mouths meeting with a painful clack of teeth. Then he shoved Dean toward the opposite door and tipped the bottle over the eight-ball. The thick liquid caught the refracted light, sending starbursts into Sam's eyes. He looked up at Dean, and the starbursts were there, as well, bleeding into the whites of his eyes and flitting around the lids like a string of fairy lights chasing each other, over and over. They fell into the scar across his face like tears, but against all sense trickled upward and set his hair afire. In the wild glow Dean's face fell apart-breathtaking ruin.

Sam pressed at his own sternum-hard-to force himself to inhale. "Nobody drives Baby but you," he said. "Nobody."

Dean bit his lip and forced a sound through his teeth that echoed through the car as though it were a howling cavern. Not even Sam expected him to move, to fulfill that dangerous fantasy: fusion of flesh and machine that was as intimate, or more so, than the sweet percussive slam of a steering wheel into an unprotected chest.

But he did, he did.

Dean gripped the seats on either side and lowered himself onto the slicked gear shift without hesitation. The invasion might have been blissful or wracking-Dean's expressions slid from shadow to shadow without resolving. Sam had to grip his erection with brutal pressure to back himself down from the edge.

"Fuck it," Sam whispered.

Dean's movements were shallow-he lowered his head and chewed his lip in concentration-but the urge to feel the motion, the juncture, overwhelmed Sam. He slid two fingers around the gear shift where it merged with Dean's body, still trapping his cock in an unforgiving fist in order to stave off orgasm.

Another bellow like storm winds filled the cramped interior of the Impala as Sam slid one finger in, alongside the body-warmed metal, his fingertip prodding at the underside of the eight-ball ornament.

Gently as he could, feeling as though he was moving through lamplit honey, he let his cock free and placed the hand that had been holding it on Dean's lower back, pressing him away from the machine. Dean seemed prepared to mourn the momentary loss but Sam twisted two fingers inside him, driving his hips first toward the black space between the seats and then back again as he pushed against Sam's hand.

Sam reached over and yanked the lever below the driver's seat, which slid forward with a jolt and clicked angrily at the end of its track. He swung over to the seat, bracketing Dean's legs with his own. Slipping his cock into the space between Dean's thighs relieved some of the agonizing pressure for a moment, but the act made Dean writhe and Sam wince. He moved his hips back only a bit, and the Impala's steering wheel dug into the small of his back.

Searching for a visual anchor, Sam spread his left hand across Dean's spine, fingers appearing to sink into smooth and knotted flesh all at the same time. With the right hand he fucked Dean, a gentle and noiseless slide.

"Sam," Dean said. "Sammy."

"I'm here, Dean."

"What are you?" Dean asked. "You're a monster."

There was no way he could see Sam outside the jumble of light-painted shapes reflected in the window. Dean could as well have been talking about himself. He was a show, a wonder, a carnival attraction-and Sam watched, entranced by the snakeskin pattern of sweat that beaded between Dean's shoulder blades. Each pinpoint shuddered with rainshower ferocity as they moved.

"God, you're so beautiful," Dean said.

"Shh."

"Sammy."

"Don't call me that." A hard lump rose in Sam's throat, cratered like fool's gold.

"Sam. Fuck me. Please."

Sam hushed him again, this time so unwound from Dean's pleading that he nearly came. Cupping a small pool of lubricant gathered from the gearshift, Sam palmed his cock as gently as he could, fighting back from the precipice. Suspended for a moment, they breathed together-only breathed.

Then Sam began to push in.

"Yes," said Dean.

"Stop it." Sam's eyes stung.

"Yes. Oh, baby boy."

"Shut up." The entreaty was breathed across Dean's shoulder. The back of Sam's head was pressing into the car's roof, his hipbones carving sweat-filled recesses into Dean's skin. Sam clung to Dean's hip with one hand, slipping the other over Dean's mouth.

Dean slid his tongue between Sam's first and second fingers, pulled them into his mouth before biting hard enough to make Sam recoil a little.

"Don't stop," Dean said.

Sam tried a shallow thrust at the same time he delivered a vicious pinch to the muscle of Dean's ass. "Please, Dean. Just shut your mouth." He could hear the quaver in his own voice.

"Can't-"

Sam pushed forward harder this time. Once, twice. Deep in the cocoon of the drug, he could have been content to stay almost motionless, trying each muscle in turn to better fit himself against the ridged map of Dean's skin.

"Sam."

Sam gathered what little he could of Dean's hair in a fist and pushed his face against the headrest, desperate for reprieve from the pleading litany. His grip went slack with the next thrust. He could feel the breath that Dean drew through the bellows of his back.

"Love you, Sammy."

Close to choking on the knot in his throat, eyes swimming with water and light, Sam mashed Dean's lips against the vinyl once more. Sliding backward from each sharp thrust, the painful press of the steering wheel was a warning, an exhortation for Sam to get closer, closer still.

It no longer seemed to matter that Sam kept losing and regaining his grip on Dean's hair with each snap of his hips. Dean had fallen silent. The only sounds within the car now were rasping breaths and the collisions of skin-each its own wreck with its own marks to bestow.

When Sam slid his hand along a burn-ravaged hip, reaching around to hold Dean's cock, he saw in his periphery that Dean had sunk his teeth into the cool vinyl of the seat as if it were flesh. His eyes were squeezed shut and a thin trail of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth into the stitched groove of the bucket seat.

The sight punched all rational thought from Sam's head, booted his desire into overdrive. He gave Dean's cock a cruel squeeze, and used his grip there as leverage to slam his hips forward so hard his hamstrings ached and his head knocked the roof.

The noise Dean gave was wounded, ecstatic. Prayerful.

So he did it again. And again. Condensation and light painted a galaxy across the fogged windshield.

As Sam fought to subdue the golden creature twisting in his arms, Dean came once again. It wasn't until Sam heard the pop of Dean's perfect teeth biting through the vinyl of the headrest to the foam under-layer that he broke-grasping and swelling and shouting and coming.

Afterward, he held Dean suffocatingly tight, high on the drug and on the struggle of one heaving ribcage against another. When the tear slipped from his eye and disappeared into the deep channel of Dean's spine, Sam felt the restless clamor of Dean's war within himself wane and fall still.


	12. Chapter 12

Sam woke at dawn with a terrible thirst burning his throat. His tongue was dry and swollen, and his cramped body stretched and popped-raw bones with tendons grinding over them. He felt hollowed out from spine to sternum.

Both he and Dean, slumped in the seat beside him, were still naked. Sam punched his shoulder softly and then shook him. Dean's name was nothing but a whisper in his ravaged mouth.

Dean sat up, clutching his head. He blinked a few times, looked around the car in wonderment like an amnesiac. A path of dried blood ran from the edge of the graft to the corner of his jaw.

Sam reached for it, but was shrugged away.

"Water," said Dean.

Sam cleared his throat, bringing up thick and foul-tasting phlegm. "Clothes first."

He was shocked that Dean could manage a leer in his addled state, but the look that he gave Sam was every kind of sin-and some invented. It was the effect of it that surprised Sam the most, though. In that moment he could have been easily convinced of Dean's immortality, and of his own. The suspension that Cas had talked about felt like a physical force, a seamless draw into a bead of amber where the two of them could wait out the end of the world. It swelled inside Sam when sunrise lit up the air within the car.

Dean scrubbed a hand over his head and the motes that leapt into the air were gold dust for a moment. Then they settled and Dean closed his eyes, and it was all gone.

They pushed through the breakfast crowd at a fast food joint, disheveled and smelling of sex, taking turns on the single grimy water fountain in the back near the bathrooms. The basin was so low Sam almost had to bend double to reach it. He was too dehydrated to piss, too woozy to eat, and too full of everything Dean to do anything other than wait, and drink.

After a few minutes, an employee carrying a mop came back and gave them a dirty look, so they moved on.

In the parking lot, Sam swore that Dean almost-_almost_-made a move to hand him the keys. But it might have been a trick of the light, or the drug's fleeing power. Or it could be Dean's return to restlessness; he jangled like a keychain.

As if the night still held a little sway over them, they rode with the radio off. In the split seconds between the change of gears, Sam listened for Dean's breath.

Meg was in the loft when they returned, but Cas was not. After Dean spurned her yesterday, Sam almost expected to find that she'd shredded Cas like crepe paper, torn him apart on the altar of her jealousy.

But it seemed her altar had been a solitary one: she lay topless on the office floor within a semicircle of beer bottles. Sunlight filtering in from the loft space lit the two or three inches of amber liquid left in each bottle like offertory tea lights. Meg's skin was pebbled, nipples still stiff from the night's cold. The veined-marble expanses of her unscathed skin set Sam's teeth on edge.

Dean shook his head at the sight, but there was a soft smile on his lips.

Sam stepped in, grabbed one of the beers, and emptied its contents over Meg's face.

Bottles went flying, knocked by her flailing limbs. The smell of stale beer burst upward in nauseous frat-house waves.

"What the _fuck_?" A drop of mascara-darkened beer fell from Meg's chin and drew a charcoal trail between her breasts.

"Rise and shine, Meg," Sam said.

Dean made to chuckle but bit it back behind his fist when Meg shot a furious look his way.

"You're an asshole, you know that?" Meg said. "Both of you are."

"We've got a lot of work to do," Dean said. "Just need you up and at 'em." He dug a fingertip into the corner of his damaged eye and pulled out a grain of unidentifiable gunk, examining it before flicking it away into the corner of the office.

Meg stood up. "Work? You mean _my_ work?" She kicked an overturned bottle with toe-crunching force and yanked a shirt off a hook on the nearby wall. "In case you forgot, it was me who cased Crowley while you and your dick were out making mail drops."

The contrast of Dean's scowl to his smile was deepened by the effect of the scar. "That was your part, Meg," he said. "That's what we agreed."

She shrugged the shirt on, her fingers shaking almost too hard to fasten the buttons. "Since when do we agree?" she said to Dean. "You just say it and we do it."

Dean settled into a charged stillness so profound Sam could see the muscles in his jaw clench. "You didn't have to be part of this, Meg."

"Yeah? Well I brought _him_ in." She swung her arm out in Sam's direction, the unbuttoned cuff of the shirt snapping against her skin. "When is _he_ going to do something?"

Dean inhaled through his nose. "Sam's part in this hasn't come yet."

"So for now he's just your personal fuckhole?"

"Jesus Christ, Meg-" Sam began.

Dean waved him off, but the movement was still constricted in the flex of rage. "What, is it that I'm not being grateful enough? Fine. Meg, I'm grateful for the part you played. What else do you want?"

"Played?" Her wide-eyed expression might have been comical were she not vibrating with fury. "So that's it? I'm out?"

"Son of a _bitch_," said Dean, finally breaking the controlled calm to punt a bottle into the wall, where it cracked in half and drooled more foul, flat beer onto the carpet. "You want to fuck? Come on, I'll fuck you right now."

He grabbed for Meg's sleeve. Sam felt the knot of envy ease when she wrenched her arm away.

"No, thanks." She tipped her chin toward Sam. "Besides, you stink of _him_." She shouldered past Dean without another look at Sam, heading over to the scatter of car keys on the desk.

Dean laughed-his typical sharp bark-but there was no mirth under it. "Feisty. Always has been."

Meg shot him the finger without turning around. She grabbed for the keys as she walked by, shirttails flapping, dragging metal on metal until it squealed and sparked.

With her footsteps echoing through the loft, Sam freed his unkempt fingernails from the red trenches they had dug in his palms.

"She'll be fine," Dean said, rubbing a hand over his face. "Let her sweat it out."

"Is she right?" Sam asked. It wasn't an indignant question, just the one hovering in front of his face.

Dean smiled, rolled his head back and forth until his neck popped. Sam felt a mirrored ache in his own bones. The polished tissue of the scar gleamed as Dean turned to face Sam. "What do you think?"

Sam only shook his head.

"Come on. Tell me."

"Am I your project?"

"My greatest," Dean said, giving his lopsided grin. "Only because you're way more than I ever expected. You're your own creation, Sam. Not mine."

"So what are you doing, then?"

Dean sniffed, amused. "Taking care of you, Sammy. I feel like I was meant to take care of you."

Sam was silent for a moment. "I don't need taking care of." It was nearly a whisper in the silent, redolent cave of the office.

"I know," said Dean. "It's okay. My part is almost over, too."

Sam wanted to protest, to say, "no," but he couldn't bring the word up to his lips. Instead, he turned away, wincing as tears brimmed hot on his lower lids.

Outside, an engine rumbled to life. Too rough and apparent to be Meg's Mercedes.

Looking over at the desk, Sam saw that Meg's keys were still on the table. She had taken the Lincoln. "Shit," he said.

"Don't worry," Dean said over his shoulder, filling a paper cup with the pungent rum from the dispenser.

"I think she's going to hurt herself," Sam said.

"Probably. Hell, she already has. Let her go," said Dean. "Come get the good shit, Sammy. Before it's too late. You can drink it out of my mouth."

Pinpricks of tears still threatening to spill, Sam found he couldn't turn back, couldn't look at Dean. Instead, he scooped up the keys to the Mercedes and walked out the door. The office behind him was silent.

It didn't matter that Meg was slowed down by driving an unfamiliar car. Sam was pretty sure he knew where she was going. He saw the dull blue-gray glimmer of the Lincoln as he crested the low ridge behind which they had hidden Rufus's gravesite.

Meg leaned against the side of the car, her pale face tipped upward, placid and indolent as if she were content to let the sun burn through her hangover and into the memory of the morning. Sam pulled up almost nose-to-nose with the Lincoln and cut the engine.

"Meg."

"I knew it was you who'd come after me."

"You took my car," Sam said.

"None of these are 'our' cars."

"Whatever. Meg, will you stop with this bullshit? Whatever you think I'm doing, I'm not."

"You're fucking everything up, Sam," she said.

"How?" he asked. "How am I fucking things up?"

Meg pounded both fists against the car door. "I don't know. It's...this isn't the way it's supposed to go. All of this feels _bad_."

"I don't understand."

She opened her eyes, and rolled her hip along the smooth metal of the door, just as she had in the salvage yard. "You're already the golden boy," she said. "You don't have to play it, too."

As she walked closer, Sam could see she had been crying.

"So," Meg said, running a fingernail down Sam's chest, the coquetry ruined by her puffy and red-rimmed eyes. "What does it feel like?"

"What?" Sam asked, stopping the course of her hand by wrapping his own around it.

"Dean," she said. "How does his cock feel inside you?"

Sam dropped her hand and it fell limp by her side. "I don't really know."

She laughed, the sound desperate and choked with recent tears. "Of course. Of course! He let you fuck him."

"Meg, you're going to have to explain this to me, because I don't understand. Okay? Dean lets Cas fuck him. What's the big deal?"

"He let Cas fuck him after Cas had his trust."

"Is that what this is all about?" Sam asked. "You don't think Dean trusts me?"

"I'm just not sure he should."

"I think you're projecting."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Meg said, the pitch and volume of her voice rising.

"It means _you_ don't trust me," Sam said.

"Is that what you want to hear? Huh, Sam? That I regret bringing you into this?" She turned her head back and forth-anything to avoid looking Sam in the eye. "Fine, yes. I do. I wanted you, Sam. But I wanted Dean more."

"You've had him."

"Not since you. You're fucking it all up, Sam."

"Only for you. Cas doesn't have a problem with this."

Another laugh. "Cas is furniture. He's a fucking sofa. Everybody sits on him, and then they forget him."

"He sees more than you think he does," said Sam.

"Oh, so you're the expert now," Meg said. "Dean 2.0."

"I'm not Dean."

"You don't _see_ Dean," she said, now meeting Sam's gaze with furious eyes. "You want him for his scars. I want him for who he is."

"He _is_ his scars," Sam said through clenched teeth. "The ones you see and the ones you can't. We _all_ are."

This seemed to deflate her utterly, sinking her chin and shoulders. "Not me," Meg said.

Sam shook his head. When he spoke, it was quiet. "No."

Meg looked up at him again, twin tears racing toward her chin. "Then help me."

Just as he had in the salvage yard, his legs not yet free from their casts, Sam hauled Meg toward him, fingers curled into her short hair. But it was not for a kiss; instead he put his lips to her neck and sucked a livid mark there until she squirmed from the pain.

Rather than pulling away, she said, "Yes."

Assured that she would stand her ground against his assault, Sam loosened his grip on her hair and with both hands tore at the work shirt, sending pearlized buttons skipping into the sand at their feet. He took her by the shoulders and spun her away from him, bending her forward over the hood of the Mercedes, then pressed himself against her until the serrations on the car's grille bit into the skin of her legs. A callback, a reminder. The thought of those marks made Sam instantly hard.

It was past mid-morning, and the metal of the hood must have been hot to the point of discomfort, but Meg did not move as Sam unfastened his jeans and let them slide down his thighs. He rucked up her skirt, knocked her feet apart with his heavy boots and shoved a hand between her legs, but she was cool and dry-tense with expectation and drained by her tears.

Sam drew the hand out and spit into it, using the other to push between Meg's shoulderblades, urging her forward, further down. The car's suspension groaned, and Meg let out a tight hiss when the hood ornament bent below her sternum, bruising the skin between her breasts.

The stab of his slicked fingers into her cunt was clumsy, shallow. Sam withdrew the hand then spit again, and tried to push his cock in.

Meg wriggled below him, reaching behind, trying to guide him into her ass. Sam smacked the hand away.

"Only Dean-" she began.

"No," said Sam, and buried himself inside her as he held her hands to the blinding metal.

Pinioned between Sam and the car-the strained metal of the hood ornament-Meg barely breathed but grew wet in spite of herself under Sam's quick and precise thrusts. He bore down on her, slamming her into the grille and driving the marks on her legs from indentation to bruise to laceration with the force of it.

Meg came when the hood ornament snapped beneath her and clattered onto the hood. Sam followed not long after.

The broken bit of painted plastic-Mercedes' simple and circular signet-tumbled over the bumper and into the sand as Meg stood. She pulled her skirt down over her hips, not quite able to hide the gelid trickle between her thighs. Sam saw she was shaking from head to heel, and instead of upsetting him it put him in mind of Dean's barely caged energy and made his cock twitch even in its post-sex lethargy.

When Meg turned around, the sight took Sam's breath away. She was anointed-the torn flaps of her shirt framing the wound between her breasts where the sharp stump of the hood ornament had punched through the skin there. As Sam watched, a line of bright blood fell from the rip in her skin, wending down to pool in her navel and spill over to stain the fabric at her waistline. Capillaries had burst up and down her thighs, and the meshwork damage climbed up, tempting, underneath the hem of her skirt.

She was a story in fluids: blood, tears, semen. Printed on an altered canvas barely resembling the former, when the story was yet an unwritten idea. Sam wanted to touch the line of blood, interrupt its path, bring the taste of it to his lips.

Meg stared past him. "You shouldn't have done that."

He said nothing, still transfixed.

"That was only for Dean," she said. "Only for Dean." A tear gathered in the inner corner of her left eye and dropped, making her wince with the salt of it when it came in contact with her ruptured skin.

Sam reached out a hand, brushed the tear's trail with his fingertip along Meg's jawline. "Dean shares everything with me," he said, softly.

Meg's arm was a blur; the slap caught him high on the cheekbone and sent stars dancing in his vision. He staggered back.

Meg was already behind the wheel, the Lincoln's engine roaring to life, when Sam regained his senses. He shielded his eyes just in time to block the plume of sand thrown up by the tires as she gunned it in reverse. Then he picked his keys up from where they lay half-buried and followed.

On the open two-lane blacktop, the Lincoln had the advantage of momentum, but the Mercedes was much more nimble. Scanning the horizon for oncoming cars, Sam pushed the little sedan into the opposite lane and pulled up beside Meg. When she looked over at him, he saw the shirt was still open over her pallid skin, the line of blood in the dry desert air turning the same burgundy as her lipstick on the first day they had kissed.

He had only a moment to look before the deafening pop and swell of the side curtain airbag blocked his vision and he was forced to turn his attention to the wheel as the front tires skittered and bucked. Meg had slammed into him with the side of the Lincoln.

"Fuck." Sam batted at the fabric balloon as it deflated, finally resorting to opening the window to see through the powder-clotted glass. The sad ghost of the airbag whipped out the window and was pinned against the side of the car. He was still driving in the opposing lane.

"Meg!" As the word left his mouth, Sam knew with complete conviction that she was not trying to kill him. If that were the case, she would have taken the Mercedes with its soft cocoon of safety features, instead of weaponizing the Lincoln with its unyielding frame and seat belts hacked off at the join. She was trying to hurt herself, to create with an instant of scarring force a connection on the same level as Sam had with Dean.

The idea pushed an icy spire of jealousy into Sam's gut. It bloomed cold on his face, clearing his vision.

Without even looking over, Meg rammed him again, snapping the wheel to the left. She was jostled by the hit, but the soft, impact-absorbing body of the Mercedes was no match for the Lincoln's heavy steel frame. Sam felt the door buckle in, sending the front wheel slightly askew. He slammed on the brakes, laying down foul-smelling lines of rubber in an erratic path across both lanes before the car slowed.

Meg must have seen him disappear from her view, because she hit the brakes as well. The Lincoln spun out, but its rear wheels sluiced in the soft shoulder, sending the back of the car dipping. For a moment as it skidded, it looked like it would swirl to a stop, but Meg had lost control of the steering wheel and as the back tires turned inward the car was launched from the blacktop, vaulting over the slope of the shoulder and landing roof-down on the uneven terrain beside the road.

Unlike Rufus's crash, which had unfolded over the span of a half-second, the air seemed to thicken around the car's wide body, the chrome tracing short silver arcs over the tops of the low foothills before the detonation of glass shot the gleam into a thousand pieces.

Sam watched the wreck happen, unmoving, until the Mercedes slowly drifted back end-first off the road itself, and came to rest with a scrape of its undercarriage on tarmac. Sam's shoulder was sore where it had been wedged against the window in his spin-out, but he was otherwise unharmed. He got out of the car, leaving it half-on and half-off the road, and went to where Meg and the destroyed Lincoln waited.

On the side that faced him, a single bare foot protruded from the window, outlined by a constellation of glass. Sam walked around to the other side, examining the car anew. He remembered the slow circuit he made around it in the salvage yard, appraising, Dean looking expectantly on.

Meg lay within the shaded tabernacle of the car, its roof compressed and now buoying her up like a bier. Like the young woman he and Dean had found on their night cruise-the blood in her blonde hair as portentous as the night's own fragmentation into golden shards-Meg looked as if she belonged within her destroyed grotto.

Sam crouched down. Her eyes were open but she did not speak. Her cheek rested against the jagged mouth of the broken window, where the points of glass pressed tiny wounds into her face. Looking closer, Sam could see a ledge of bone distending the skin of her throat. The neck was broken, the spinal cord probably almost severed.

Meg's shallow breaths mingled and disappeared within the hiss of escaping steam and engine coolant. The engine ticked, a countdown.

Her wrist lay draped over the arc of convoluted metal that had framed the passenger window, fingers splayed. Sam picked it up and held it in his own. It was already very cold.

Meg's breath hitched and her body twitched, as if she were trying to pull the hand away, but the damage to her body left her captive and vulnerable.

"I know what you were trying to do," Sam said, and kissed the second knuckle of her smallest finger.

"I understand it."

Another kiss.

Meg closed her eyes.

"But you can't make the scars."

Another kiss.

"Not unless they were already there." Sam pressed his lips one last time to her clammy forefinger, folded her fingers into a fist and passed her arm back inside the crushed window well.

With Meg fading inside it, the car seemed to exhale coolness, dulling the flare of adrenalin that ricocheted through Sam's flesh. Meg breathed and breathed, without rattle or whisper, so the last one was unexpected. He waited, but no more breaths came.

With the insistent noon sun hot on his back and his muscles cramping, Sam finally stood up. Using a short length of hydraulic hosing yanked from underneath the Lincoln's hood, he siphoned its tank, the taste of gasoline sweet-sour on his tongue. He scraped the soft underside of his arm to bleeding on the toothed window frame as he fumbled Meg's lighter from her pocket.

The trail of gas was short and thin, and Sam had to close his eyes and hold his breath as his makeshift fuse chuffed to burning life and sent the car up like a signal flare. He did not stay to watch, but turned his back and went to test the Mercedes on the road again.

It pulled to the right and fought any attempt to correct it, but guided slowly it was driveable. The air conditioner was glacial; Sam had all day to limp back into the city.

Each time he looked back he expected a Biblical column of smoke, but not even a wisp transected the sky's flat, blue plane.

If Sam expected to shake Dean out of a drugged stupor when he returned to the loft, he was pleased to see him dangling his legs over one of the window ledges on the loft level-the remainder of the glass kicked out and glimmering in the rocky soil below.

Sam pulled the Mercedes forward until its nose touched the angular shadow cast by the corner of the building, a curious emptiness settling into his chest.

"Hey, Dean," he called.

There may have been a hint of a smile on the face that looked down at him, but Sam was too far away to tell. Dean swung his legs back up and moved into the gloom of the loft.

When the elevator ground to a stop, its platform still even with the loft floor despite a lack of maintenance, Sam saw that Dean hadn't retreated to the office but still stood against the wall beside the window-spine in a languid S-curve and hands in his pockets.

Sam's footsteps were loud on the concrete.

"Did you give her a Viking send-off?" Dean asked.

There was no way to read the emotion in the words. Sam nodded.

"Good."

"Did you know she wasn't coming back?"

"She was gone way before she went out to the desert," said Dean. "But I knew you'd come back."

"Maybe I never left," said Sam.

This made Dean smile at last, his full-wattage lopsided grin. Torn into ragged halves and so perfect that Sam ached.

"And then there were three," Dean said.

"Where's Cas?"

"He likes to wander. You know he doesn't drive?" Dean said, pushing himself off the wall. "I didn't really think of it until now."

Sam was silent.

"Anyway, he'll be back. Got a sixth sense, or something. He knows when shit's about to go down."

"_Is_ it about to go down?"

"About to," Dean said, looking away toward the office.

"Come here," Sam said.

"Too fucking bright," said Dean. "Step over into the shade, Sammy."

Because of his smile, his presence, and the sense of galloping time, Sam did. He walked over and pushed Dean's shoulder against the painted cinderblock wall, fitted his chin in the notch between forefinger and thumb and kissed the tenacious taste of gasoline onto his tongue.

"You smell like her," Dean whispered against Sam's lips.

The slap he delivered to Dean's cheek was just sharp enough to take the edge off his indolent superiority. "Make me forget, then," Sam told him.

"Crowley is going to make a move."

"Soon," said Sam. "Not now."

He led Dean by the hand into the office. The smell of stale beer still drifted through the upper layers of the air inside, but neither one of them commented or cared. The room was already hazed over with their expectation-fear and want, something both hopeless and hopelessly magnetic.

Sam undressed Dean slowly, feeling out the map of his body in the room's half light. He removed his own shirt and stepped behind Dean, pulling him close, trapping his arms against the ruin of his torso and splaying both their hands across the same terrain.

Sam bent his head and bit the flesh where Dean's neck met his shoulder. He pulled away into the relative coolness of the air and placed kisses-one atop each vertebra-down Dean's backbone, lips touching immaculate skin and gnarled graft by turns.

Dean caught his breath as Sam slid his tongue downward from the base of his spine, fingers pushing at his flesh with an urgency yet to be entirely realized. And then the brief wait was over; Sam pushed his tongue into Dean without hesitation, rocking him forward on his toes and leaving him grasping the air for purchase he would never find.

"Fuck, Sammy."

Sam pulled away, landed a hard, open-handed blow across Dean's right buttock, and went right back, pinching the stinging flesh apart.

Dean hummed, straining, but did not speak again. When his knees gave way, Sam eased his descent to the filthy carpet with strong hands on his hips. Dean sunk down onto his elbows, canting his hips upward.

Another slap, a backhand, from the left.

"Please," Dean said.

"Turn over," Sam said.

He did not so much turn as collapse onto the floor, limbs gone flaccid but cock hard and waiting. Sam left it untouched for the moment, choosing instead to work a single finger in. He could feel Dean fighting the urge to push up into the touch.

"Good," Sam said, adding another finger. With the other arm a warm pinion laid along Dean's chest, he brushed his thumb over and over Dean's lower lip, fucking slow and shallow with his fingers.

When Dean heard Sam spitting into his hand, he closed his eyes.

"I want to see you," Sam said. "Need you to see me."

"Don't want to look," said Dean.

"I don't care," said Sam, forcing Dean's legs apart and pushing in so suddenly that Dean's eyes flew open.

He gritted his teeth, and Sam kissed his chin, the corner of his mouth, the scarred eyelid. "Shh," he breathed into Dean's ear. "Be still for a minute."

A struggle so feeble it seemed cursory. "I can't."

"You can. You will. I'll help you."

Sam lowered his full weight onto Dean's chest, holding him, pinning him. His face pressed against one of Dean's cheeks and his forearm against the opposite, he matched Dean's breath until they rose together like the birth of dust devils beside the mountains.

"Take care of me, Sammy."

"I will, Dean. For now." He began to move.

That this-cheek to cheek, rocking into Dean-should feel more like a farewell than walking away from Meg's roadside pyre was infuriating. Sam clenched his jaw in defiance of the idea. He let Dean rise to a slow wave beneath him, still managing to tamp down the manic vibration that threatened to push out from his belly and wrap them both in its uncertain net.

Words hid in the fissures forming between their moving bodies, but Sam could not bring himself to say them, so he reached into that brimming space and wrapped his hand around Dean's cock. "Come on," he said.

"Too soon," said Dean.

"It's all too soon," Sam said, and slammed his hips forward, driving out any talk or thought. Sweat beaded at his scalp and fell through the curtain of his hair, welding the strands together in clumps. He licked the droplets from Dean's lips.

He felt the warm spill of Dean's orgasm between them, though the face he looked at was serene. One thumb light over Dean's closed eyelid, his cheek pressed so tight against the scar on Dean's face it could have been his own, Sam pulled him into quickening thrusts and came at last.

In the chasm between their chests the unsaid things still waited, but Sam crowded them out, holding Dean to him so tightly that nothing could fit between.


	13. Chapter 13

When Sam woke, twice as filthy and stiff as the night before, he saw that they were no longer alone in the room.

Cas had returned, standing silent as a pillar in the doorway. He might have looked stern if not for his rumpled clothing and careless hair.

The world was falling in around them-the pressurized nucleus of Sam and Dean, and Cas in his sentinel orbit-set to creaking and buckling cacophony as they fused. The structure was unstable, but it wasn't Cas's invasion that upset the balance. It never had been. When Sam could no longer hold him, no longer lock the violence of his shuddering in his arms, Dean would fly apart regardless of who was there to watch, of who was there to scramble for purchase and scream at the tattered shreds.

Sam could already feel the disintegration against his skin. Smells, sensations dulled and merged. With Dean's waking lethargy fading in his embrace, even the reek of beer and sex dispersed and left them exposed. Everything tasted of cold metal.

Dean had carpet fuzz in his stubble and a half-roused grin that destroyed Sam's equilibrium. "The man comes around," Dean said, gesturing at Cas. "Told you he had a sixth sense for this shit. What's the word?"

"There are media vans at the rehabilitation center," Cas said.

"Well, shit on me," said Dean. He waggled his eyebrows at Sam, who wanted to punch the glee right off his face. "You walked all the way over to Healing Oasis?"

Cas nodded.

"I swear if I didn't know better I'd think you could teleport," Dean said, rolling to his feet with a grunt.

The lightless walls of the office still protected his nakedness, enrobed him. If Sam could draw him back down into shadow, obscure his battered form and shield him from inevitability, he would have hauled Dean through the floor. Instead he stood up.

Cas tilted his head, an expressionless appraisal. With Sam's ruined legs and Dean's scarred torso, a merging of the two of them would have been monstrous and lovely beyond imagining. They were halves of some whole that dismissed the unscathed, sending the pristine parts fluttering off to haunt another unlived life.

Dean bent and pulled on pants gone rigid with grime. "Shake a leg, Sammy. This is it."

The three of them piled into the Impala, the smell of hot vinyl and sweat scooped out through Baby's open windows. Dean slapped his hand on the wheel with every punch of the clutch, swaying forward and back like a mental patient.

For the first time since Sam's arrival in the city, a film of clouds spread across the sky, not threatening rain but dampening the typical brightness. Sam tried to let the curve of the bucket seat take his spine, but tension played along the vertebrae in the pattern of Dean's restlessness. He was sore by the time they pulled past the chain link and into the salvage yard.

Lucifer stood, subverting the light that filtered through the cloud cover. Sam clenched his jaw until it ached.

"Last working car in the stable," Dean said, throwing Baby into park. "Sorry you didn't get to take him for a spin before the big day, but fate's a bitch sometimes, right?"

"I don't think it's fate," Sam said.

Dean's smile melted. "Well, you're right about that, Sam. It's engineering. All the best things are." He looked through the windshield. "Go say, 'hi.'"

Sam struggled to pull the keys from his pocket even though the jeans lay low and stretched with wear. The absence of the skull key ring against his hip bone was even more jarring than its insistent push had been. He could hear the clunk of every bar inside the door in succession as the key turned and the knob popped up. The car was a broiling coffin of dust; Dean had neglected the interior while lavishing his attentions on the paint job, the trim.

It made Sam shake his head. How very Dean. Sam didn't even jump when Dean honked the horn behind his back.

"Time's a-wastin'," he called. "I need you to tail Crowley and his entourage."

"How do you know which way he's going?" Sam asked.

"There's only one way he can go," said Dean. "He's got to take 580 to the south city limits."

"What if he's trying to avoid attention?"

"With news vans already lined up? I don't think so," Dean said. "This is his big comeback. It's going to be spectacular." He chucked the car in reverse, the transmission protesting, rocking Baby's wheels in the dust. "The clinic's at Virginia and Linden. I'm posting Cas on the overpass at the 431 junction. We'll knock him out before he leaves the Reno line."

"You will," Sam said, the words emerging with more bitterness than he intended. "You'll knock him out."

"Haven't you learned anything, Sammy? This is our game."

Sam said nothing. As he turned to slap the curtain of dust away from the dark vinyl of the headrest, Dean peeled out and drove away.

Crowley's grand emergence turned out to be even bigger than Sam expected. It had the air of a press conference, lacking only a podium as the magician-dressed in his standard black suit and tie-walked out of the double glass doors at the front of the rehab center. Even looking a little plumper than he had on the poster for the Nightmare show, his theatricality had lost none of its polish. Crowley whipped a pair of dark wraparound shades from his breast pocket and slid them on with the slick dexterity of a veteran conniver.

Sam had parked Lucifer one street over. It was far too conspicuous a car for anonymous tailing, and unease rose in his gut, tainting his mouth with the tang of bile.

Despite the clamor of the reporters, Crowley said nothing as he walked the gauntlet toward a silver limousine. Before getting in, he flashed the sign of the devil horns-first and last finger upraised. On any other day, Sam might have rolled his eyes. Now the synchronicity made his skin burn.

Boot heel scraping on the asphalt, he turned and jogged back to the car. Lucifer projected a stern potentiality that seemed to grow each time Sam saw it, appearing to smoke and idle even though the engine was off. The key ring knocked a tiny chip in the paint near the door handle as Sam unlocked it.

Along the main drag and its peppering of traffic lights, it was easier to follow the limousine undetected, a few cars behind. Crowley and his unwitting parade snaked through the heart of the city-its bare, functional casinos a sad echo of the blinding Vegas strip. That those second-rate structures should be among the last that the magician would see gave Sam a measure of comfort.

Gaining speed down into the funnel where 395 met 580, a red glow began to strobe behind Sam's eyes. It was far too slow to be in time with his heartbeat, and in a few seconds it resolved to a steady illumination like an artificial display in his view. The cloverleaf interchanges took on razor curves and the concrete support pillars subdivided the sky-all of it blown out and greywashed, waiting to be painted with the split-second pointillism of trauma.

A blue-and-white sign at Sam's left read, "Thank you for Visiting Reno. We Hope You Enjoyed Your Stay." It disappeared behind the upswing of an overpass, and as Lucifer emerged into a slice of weak sunlight from below its shadow, Sam saw Baby roar out from the merge lane. Dean's eyes were white, upraised and ecstatic as he brutalized the accelerator, the car fishtailing in a fog of exhaust.

Sam hit the brakes and swung Lucifer into the pullout lane so hard the passenger door sparked against the guardrail. On the road ahead, a blue SUV swerved in Baby's crescent-shaped wake, wobbling to the music of horns. The air already stank of heated rubber. Dean cut the Impala across the path of Crowley's limousine, and for a moment it looked Baby would take a t-bone impact from the hurtling limo. But the driver threw the wheel over toward the shoulder and the limo spun nearly 360 degrees, its hurtling tail catching the Impala's rear bumper and doubling its speed as it headed for the concrete barrier.

Sam's blood boomed loud in his ears; he might have spoken Dean's name or he might have said nothing at all. Regardless, the explosion as Baby's front end impacted the barrier was soundless. An entire galaxy of glass from the windshield blew into the grey sky...and with it, Dean, his arms outstretched in welcome.

Sam bolted from the car and ran, the impact from his boots traveling up the pathways of his scars until it felt as though his legs would shatter. Sprinting by the limousine, Sam shoved an opening car door out of his way, earning an agonized yelp from the passenger whose ankle he had smashed with the force of it. He barely had time to take in the shrunken ruin of Baby's front end before he vaulted the barrier, landing on spikes of pain that reached his shoulders.

Dean lay on his side in the scrub grass beyond the lip of the barrier, one arm stretched above his head and hand draped over the edge of the curb as if he were reaching for the glass that still shuddered there.

"Dean. Dean!"

The fingers that dangled above the field of glass dust twitched, and a drop of bright red blood shuddered, fell, and was drunk immediately by the parched concrete.

Sam fell to his knees, the slide scraping them to hamburger in the gravel and glass. The world twisted and swam, distorted by tears. "Dean. Oh, Jesus. Dean." Sam reached out to touch Dean's shoulder. He rolled too easily onto his back, limp and spent.

Choking on a hard sob that nearly bent him double, Sam took Dean's hand. It felt like a slippery bag of flesh filled with splinters. Tears were soaking into Sam's collar.

"S-" Dean tried his name, but could only bring up blood, this time a dark venous purple, spilling into the corners of his mouth. The side of his face where the graft had been was obliterated, his cheekbone caved in below ribbons of flesh. His eye, still intact, swam with blood.

Sam couldn't breathe for the sobs, squeezing Dean's broken hand and hating himself as he crushed it helplessly, pain on pain.

"Sammy." It was a liquid whisper.

"Dean. I'm here." Sam cradled his head, heedless of the blood that poured through his fingers.

"Baby?"

Sam shook his head, going woozy as the white-hot band of grief around his chest made him breathe in sips.

Dean coughed. A drop of blood pattered on his chin and drew a path along his jaw. "Crowley?"

"He got out," Sam said, mashing his lips against the sliding bones of Dean's hand. He tasted salt-the sweat on Dean's skin and the flow of his own tears past his lips and into his throat. "Dean, God. I-"

It took a second for Sam to realize that the bubbling rattle coming from Dean's throat was laughter-a battered and resigned approximation.

"Did I at least-" he licked his blood-covered lips, "-make it pretty?"

Sam tried and failed to grind out the scream behind his teeth. The ragged sound hit the concrete barrier and was slapped back at him, making his head spin. Dean didn't flinch. He only looked up, red smeared across his face-a clownish pietà in Sam's arms. Sam bent to kiss Dean's forehead, lips pinkening in the fine red mist that covered his face. "Beautiful. It was perfect," he whispered into the blood-dusted skin. "You're perfect. You're so fucking beautiful, Dean."

Dean blinked against the hot tears that rained down, cutting trails through the blood and clearing eyes that had already begun to cloud over. "Finish it, Sam."

"Dean. Don't leave me. You can finish it. I love you so fucking much, Dean. Please. I love you. I love you."

"Sammy. You're the angel," Dean said. Blood welled from within his throat, spilled from his nostrils. He didn't cough, didn't fight it.

Sam kissed his lips, let the rich, coppery fluid enter his mouth. At that moment, nothing could have tasted sweeter.

_You can drink it from my mouth._

He opened to the kiss, swallowing in ravenous gulps, desperate to hold on to the life crowding out of those blood-filled lungs. Sam wanted that fullness, to be a vessel for Dean to pour into. But he was hollow; even if he took every bit of Dean inside him it would never, never, _ever_ be enough.

Sam broke, anointing Dean's forehead with a sinuous line of his own blood as he spoke. He threaded his fingers through the gore-matted mess of Dean's hair. "I'll finish it," he said. "I'll do it for you."

The shadow of the underpass lit up red and blue, and sirens howled. Sam raised his head, the dry desert air suddenly cool on the blood that fell from his lips and slid over the skin of his throat. Somewhere, a woman screamed. It sounded very far away. A fire truck's deafening horn erased the noise. A cop car thumped over the median and cut across lanes of stopped cars and horrified bystanders.

When Sam looked down, Dean's eyes had closed. He laid the broken hand across Dean's chest. For the first time since the crash he could breathe, now unable to fill the ringing space that had opened up within his chest. The smells of spraying coolant, destroyed metal, blood and exhaust-all of it flooded the void as he inhaled.

He stood up as the ambulance technicians were piling out of the vehicle, bypassed the barrier and skirted around the support pillar on his way back to Lucifer. An onlooker-a woman-put up her hand in front of her mouth at the sight of him, gasping, "Oh, my God."

Sam only ran his dry tongue over his lower lip, which was now going sticky with Dean's blood, and kept walking. He looked up only once, saw a figure in a trench coat at the lip of the overpass.

Interstate 580 wasn't the only road out of Reno. Back in the car, Sam gunned Lucifer and swung him around, charging into the northbound lane. He would cross over to State Route 430.

When Crowley got to Vegas, he would be waiting.


	14. Chapter 14

There would be inquiries, invasions by the press. Not the sort of publicity that Crowley wanted so fresh out of his anti-narcotic cocoon.

Sam hoped it would hold him up in Reno. First off, he could get the lay of the land down in Vegas. Almost as importantly, the delay would rile Crowley up, make him impatient. Impatient meant stupid and careless. Stupid and careless was good.

Where he felt that Lucifer stood out in Reno, the exaggerated pomp of the Strip and its environs let Sam steer the car through the city below the radar, like a bullet in water. A frictionless slide through the star-cast underbelly of the Western world. Behind the smoked windows, the lights clumped in their gaudy galaxies grew pale and inadequate. The only constellation that registered was the one within Sam's skin. The shards hummed at a frequency that merged with the music of Lucifer's engine, to the point that Sam felt like a man on a spacewalk when he left its dark, vinyl-upholstered confines.

And the music that Sam heard when he drove was low, lovely, and strange. What Dean had not told him was that he had swapped out the Dodge's standard V6 for a heavy Powerstroke 6.7-liter turbodiesel V8 scavenged from a destroyed super-duty pickup. He'd had to lift the front end to accommodate the thing, even after knocking out the catalytic converter. All Sam knew was that Lucifer could pull away from traffic lights like an angel of God was on his tail, and that he swung around corners with the fender-grinding menace of a frontloaded hauler.

Just as the car's engine thrummed, Dean's blood buzzed in Sam's veins. Even when the last flakes of it were pushed from his face by an untended growth of beard, he could feel it inside. It was his sustenance. He would unfold his long legs into the back bench seat on some evenings and realize he had not eaten or drunk anything all day. His lips flaked and cracked, and he bit at the peeling skin until it bled, anxious again for that same taste.

Often he did not sleep, either. He made forays out of the car to jimmy newspaper vending boxes, to take the copies of the _Sun_ or the _Tribune_. People on the street noticed him-as tall and rangy and unkempt as he was Sam was hard to miss, and they gave him a wide berth. He could come back in the morning when the Strip was haunted by the odd hung-over ghost and pop the coin box on each of the faulty vending machines, foraging for gas money.

The newspapers he scanned, but not for news of Crowley's return. That inevitability was broadcast everywhere in the city from the card-snapping hands of the street-corner hawkers who passed out advertisements for Asian sex spas to the enormous banners that decorated the Gold Coast casino with its newly renovated theater space being fitted for the "Nightmare" show.

In another life, the fact that Crowley had been forced into an older, off-Strip casino might have given Sam satisfaction. He might have mentioned it to Dean, who would have laughed. But the venue was irrelevant, the city was irrelevant. The wait: irrelevant. Crowley was the dark blemish in the center of Sam's visual field, the spot that instead of blinding focused and gave him a view into its depths.

What the blackness contained was simple, and Sam returned to the comfort of that obsession as his sleepless eyes danced behind closed lids at night.

As the days since the accident stretched out, the mentions of the crash in the newspapers thinned, became relegated to side columns on inside pages, and eventually disappeared. Not once was Dean's name mentioned-but, of course, they wouldn't have known that. He was faceless, a king without a country. He whispered inside Sam, even and slow as the thump of his heart.

_The king is dead. Long live the king._

If fanfare had greeted Crowley outside Healing Oasis, his return to Las Vegas was surreptitious-or as undercover as a flamboyant attention-seeker like Crowley could be. He snuck in by the back door, literally.

Making his rounds along the perimeter of the Gold Coast property, Sam caught sight of two sports cars partially blocked from view by a dumpster next to a rear delivery door. One was a sinuous burgundy Maserati. The excruciating red paint job on the other-a Porsche Carrera GT-made the car beside it look dull and scabbed. It shone with a new wax coat, catching the unforgiving desert light like fresh blood on asphalt.

If Meg had said (so long ago) that Crowley's publicist drove a Maserati, Sam could only conclude that the more garish car belonged to the magician himself. With its low profile negated by the wild paint and the vampiric gouges in the body that ripped through the wind too loudly for anyone to mistake its presence, it was perfect for Crowley. Sam stayed to study the cars without cutting his own engine, sweating without noticing in the Dodge's barely air-conditioned interior.

By the time the door opened and Crowley emerged, Sam was gone, but not too far. Lucifer sat idling, noisily chewing his diesel, in the palm-lined rear approach to the casino. One of Dean's bequests had been a sharp tailing instinct. Perhaps it had always been there, latent within Sam, but he felt its onset when Dean's gifts were passed from mouth to mouth, blood to blood.

When Dean had fallen still for the final time-death the only better way than Sam's embrace to quell the juddering energy within him-it seemed the wild urgency had fled altogether from between the two of them. Sam found he could sit for hours, silent and unmoving, losing the rhythm of his breath to the engine as it turned over and over.

In a way, he had attained the sense of suspension that he had only glimpsed with Dean in his arms, with the haze of sex and love shielding them from its inevitable dispersion. Dean could not wait, could never wait. But Sam could. Oh, yes, he could be so very patient. He breathed deep into the cavern in his gut, listening to thoughts curling briefly in the spaces of his mind then escaping untranslated.

With the sun heading into the golden layer of afternoon, the two cars slid out along the road and came abreast briefly before splitting off like feuding birds. The Maserati headed north, the Porsche south.

Though he could see neither of the occupants, Sam swung out and followed the Porsche. It stuck to the Strip as the casino buildings thinned out-past the golf club and the beltway. At a red light at the intersection of South Las Vegas and George Crockett, Sam pulled Lucifer alongside the Porsche.

He lowered the window and stared across, but the driver-his silhouette barely visible through the tinted glass-did not open his own window. Sam put his left foot on the brake pedal and revved the engine, belching diesel exhaust that bubbled into view in his back window.

The silhouette in the car next to him moved. Sam did it again.

This time, the driver revved his engine.

Sam smiled. In dusky outline through the dark glass, he saw the gesture the driver made with his upraised hand: first and last fingers pointing skyward.

The protected turn lane flashed its green arrow. Sam heard the Porsche's engine again, the whine of a wasp. As the left-turn arrow went red but before the green in his lane, Sam gunned Lucifer and leapt out ahead, tires smoking.

He held the lead only a moment, then Crowley roared up to join him, pulling ahead by a bit as they passed the outlet mall. They had the green at the next cross-street, Robindale Road, but a car waiting opposite them honked as they flew past, the horn drowning in its own sad Doppler détente.

The light at Blue Diamond Road went yellow before Sam and Crowley passed Mesa Verde. His window still open, Sam looked over, but the sunlight blasting across the other car's window rendered it opaque as a sheet of white ice. Crowley fell back until his car was nose-to-nose with Lucifer.

Sam threw the Dodge screaming into high gear and gunned it toward the hovering yellow glow. The waiting cars must have heard them coming, because Sam blew through the red light unchallenged by cross-traffic. The cars that had been behind them hung back, and for Crowley's sake it was a good thing, as he slammed on the brakes and came in with his steaming front tires jutting out just over the crosswalk at Blue Diamond.

Sam watched the car skitter to a stop in his rearview mirror, and roared away to the clamor belated of horns from all sides of the intersection.

Dean's wreck had served to spook Crowley on the road, but it was a removed apprehension. If he had been in the driver's seat of the limousine in Reno rather than riding in it, perhaps he wouldn't have taken up Sam's drag-race dare. But he was behind the wheel now, cocky and angry and drawing strength from his home soil. Sam had gauged correctly-the confidence still bred enough recklessness to exploit. Crowley was nothing if not a confidence man.

The trap laid, Sam could afford a little time to prepare himself. Trapped between the imminent premiere of his show and the unsettling echo of the drag race, Crowley would have a few days to stew in all manner of expectation-both the kind he could put words to and the kinds he could not.

For his part, Sam had no anticipation. That implied uncertainty. What he had set in motion was now merrily snowballing, gaining enough mass to blot out contingency in a shower of sharp, freezing points. Perhaps if he felt like he could find completion or satisfaction, he could have been apprehensive. The hope for that had died along with Dean.

Instead Sam had perpetuity.

Even though leaving Lucifer half-covered in an alley felt like bereavement, Sam used the time he had to head into a local YMCA for a much-needed shower and shave. The desk attendant gave him a cheap nylon travel bag with a frayed strap. It was packed with travel-size toiletries: soap, off-brand deodorant, a toothbrush, generic toothpaste, shaving cream, a plastic twin-blade razor.

Though he stood a few inches taller than even the biggest man in the communal shower room, not one of his bathing companions greeted or even looked at him. Apparently it was protocol; Sam didn't want to speak to anyone else, either. He showered, gathered his hair into a long, sopping ponytail, and went to the mirror to shave.

The cheap and pathetic razor clotted with hair almost at once. Sam had to return to the desk to ask for another, and then another. He pressed the blades hard to his skin, their nicked edges haphazard against the remaining stubble. A point of bright pain stung his cheek as he dragged the razor across it, and blood leapt out, sliding easily outside the confines of the razor's edge.

Sam went to knock the blood-matted hair into the sink and stopped. Between the twin blades, something caught the light. The plastic lamp cover over the sink was half full of dead insects. Sam turned the razor in his fingers, looking again for the glow.

Yes, there it was. A sliver of glass excised from his face by the crude razor. It made his gut clench in fury. He used one unkempt fingernail to pry the shard up and dropped the razor with a clatter into the sink.

The glass splinter shone in a cowl of blood on his fingertip. More blood of the same vibrant color slipped down his cheek, running a slalom through the bristles still growing there and winding down past his jaw. Sam tore a paper towel from the dispenser beside the sink and blotted the wound gently, the remaining water on his skin spreading a spider-legged impression in diluted blood across the surface of the rough paper.

He folded it and set it aside. No artistry was accidental. Dean taught him that.

The scar had only been torn half open. Sam dabbed at the returning blood with the finger of one hand then, with deliberation, pushed the tiny glass shard back into the pocket created by the laceration. His skin fought with it, one point pressing into his fingertip and the other burrowing back into his face. Sam chased the pain, searched for it. It wasn't until he dragged his callused fingertip over the lip of the wound and sent the glass stabbing into untouched flesh that it stayed.

Sam's eye was watering. He blinked out a tear that fell into the cut. The sting doubled but the splinter remained in place.

After a moment he resumed shaving, moving delicately around the spot where the old scar and the new conjoined and began to scab over.

The attendant at the door had asked if Sam wanted a bandage. He'd nodded. The little plastic strip was printed all over with tiny images of Snoopy. Sam had laughed, but the attendant had not. She seemed, in fact, anxious to see him through the door and swallowed by the desert morning, as if that were the only thing that could burn him clean. As if she still saw Dean's blood on his lips.

Sam could still taste it sometimes: when he woke up, when he drove.

It was strong in his throat as he steered Lucifer toward the Gold Coast. The wind was high and hot. It tore through the 'Nightmare' banners on the building, making them strain and snap at their tethers with the sound of breaking bones.

Though the stirring dust stung his eyes, Sam got out and stood next to his car-arms and legs crossed in easy repose-at the rear entrance to the theater.

Crowley, the knife-creases in his black suit already picking up and holding onto the swirling grains of dust, emerged with his publicist a few moments after Sam had pulled up. With sunglasses over his eyes, Sam could not read his full expression, but one side of his mouth curved up in a knowing smile. The magician waved his publicist away, and the small man was just a little too quick to scurry to his scab-colored car and disappear into the scrim of flying sand.

Even as the sound of the engine faded into the drone of the far-off highway, the two men examined one another, silent amid curls of stinging sand, waiting. Sam's patience was quiet and infinite; he stood with his face as inscrutable as if he had the brim of a Stetson pulled low over his eyes. He would not be the first to break.

"Well," Crowley said, mopping at his brow with his left-hand shirt cuff, "If it isn't Fast and Furious."

For the first time, Sam registered that the man was British.

"Did you get a widdle boo-boo?" Crowley asked, pointing to the ridiculous bandage. "Between you and me, I think it was worth it. In all honesty, I wasn't too keen on the 'itinerant lumberjack' look." He slipped his sunglasses off, squinting, and tried in vain to pick the dust out of the frame with blunt fingernails. "Far better to let the world see that pretty face, yeah?"

Sam ran his fingertip over the bandaged wound in his face, saying nothing.

"Strong, silent type, eh?" Crowley said, his voice only beginning to unravel at the edges from discomfort. "Don't like that much, either. So why don't you tell me what it is I've got that you want instead of standing there like Peter Pan's fucking shadow."

"Peter Pan chased his shadow," Sam said. "I'm chasing you."

Crowley replaced his sunglasses within a sudden lull in the wind. "Well," he said, "_that's_ not creepy at all." But he stayed, looking at Sam through the dark lenses, projecting combined stubbornness and unease.

"That's a beast," Crowley said, gesturing toward Lucifer. "I'll admit it surprised me for being such a fucking tank."

"This is Lucifer," said Sam.

Crowley's laugh split the still afternoon. "_Lucifer!_ Oh my, but you are the dramatic one. I go over the top onstage, but damned if you aren't the real thing."

Sam smiled, thin-lipped.

"So tell me about Lucifer," said Crowley.

"1974 Dodge Challenger," Sam said. "He was a gift."

"Hell of a gift. The vintage ones aren't really my speed, but this thing's souped up to her tits. So to speak." Crowley looked out over the top rim of his shades, the look frankly appraising.

Sam couldn't tell if Crowley was sizing up him or the car.

"Somebody _likes_ you," said Crowley. "Was it your daddy? Got a big brother who pokes about in junkyards?"

"I don't have a brother," Sam said.

"Mm-hm. Sure. In any case, sad to say you caught me with my daily driver the other day. She looks hot, but she handles like a fat girl. Would you consider yourself a true aficionado?"

"I like what cars do," said Sam.

"Fair enough," Crowley said. "I'm going to make you an offer. How would you like to see some _real_ machines? I've got a Lotus Evora at home, and a Pagani roadster that will blow the top of your head off. Care to take a peek?"

Sam unfolded his long limbs, and Crowley flinched back minutely. "Like you said, the vintage ones are more my speed," Sam told him.

"Your loss, Mr. Shadow. Anyway, nice to meet a fan." Crowley's tone was condescending. "Did you catch my last show, 'King of Hell?'"

"I saw you once," Sam said. "You made something disappear."

Another scratchy chuckle. "You're a laugh a minute, Moose. That's two thirds of my career." Crowley removed a card from the inside breast pocket of his black blazer and extended it toward Sam between his first and second finger. "Here. Call my publicist. He'll throw you a couple of freebies to 'Nightmare.' You may want to find some different clothes, though. Even Gold Coast tends to frown on vagrants."

Sam reached across the sand-filled void between them and took the card by its very edge. He nodded and turned back to open Lucifer's door. When he looked back, Crowley was turning to leave.

"Oh, Mr. Crowley?" he said, scooping one of the old, creased 'Nightmare' promo posters from Reno out of the Dodge's passenger seat. "One more thing."

Crowley turned, slowly, as if expecting that Sam's face had changed, that he had become someone else altogether.

Sam gave another smile, wide enough this time to wrinkle the Snoopy bandage on his cheek, and held out the poster. "Can I have your autograph?"

Over the course of his short stay in Vegas, Sam had hung close to the Strip. Its tawdriness served to focus rather than distract him. It brought him outside of himself-a pallid landscape where the clean, hard planes grew gradually opaque with each day's distance from seeing, knowing, _holding_ Dean.

The insistent wind of the day might have whistled and rattled in the emptiness there, but the structure that still looked like Sam Winchester had no eaves or crooks or corners. It was an endless polished bowl, swallowing sound-lovely if one could set aside the terror of it. It seduced the carnival lights of the Strip, ushered them into blackness and refused to reflect them back.

But he couldn't feast on the flickering casinos forever. It was no sort of sustenance. For the first time, Sam drove through the exurbs and the city's fringes, shadowy by comparison even with the sun at its peak. The lives here were not on display but tucked into air-conditioned doors one after another-laundromat, bar, pawn shop, blocks of squat adobe-style apartments. Even those who stood on the corners with plastic trash bags turned their faces away from the street.

Near evening, the display in a Homeless Mission Thrift Store window made Sam stop and pull the car over. He ignored the cheap string lights pinned with yellowing tape around the window and the jingling bell on the door. Inside it was cool and musty, smelling much like Lucifer had when Sam had opened his doors for the first time: a withered despondence pushed into potentiality with a breath of new air.

"I'm living in my car," Sam told the clerk. "I need a suit for an interview."

"This is where we sell to the public," the clerk said, holding a phone up to her ear, not looking at Sam. "You need to go downtown to the Mission."

"I don't have time," he said, calmly.

The clerk turned. She let the phone slip from her hand a little bit. Compared to Sam, who loomed over the counter, she was very small.

"Um…" she said, "I'm not allowed to give clothes away at this location. Sorry."

Sam slipped four fingers into one of his pockets, a show. "I have a little money," he told her. "I'd only like to try one on."

"We're about to close."

"No. You're not. Not if the sign in the window is right."

"Look," the girl said, now unable to hide her nervousness, "this store doesn't have a whole lot of cash or anything."

Sam put out his hand, and she backed away when he placed it palm-down on the glass countertop. "I don't want your money. I don't want anything _you_ can give me. I just want to try on a suit." He pointed toward the window display. "That one."

"But that's-" the girl said, then stopped. She sighed, but there was a tremor underneath it. "I can't reach it. But if you can take it down, you can try it."

Sam nodded. The clerk had likely been about to say something on the order of the fact that the suit in the window wasn't appropriate for a job interview. And she was right. It wasn't. The fabric was pale white linen, fully lined. Not expensive, but not cheap, either. As Sam came closer, he saw that the department store tags still dangled from the sleeve of the jacket. When he peeled it from the mannequin, he saw why the suit had been donated: there was a rust-colored stain on the left lapel, small but noticeable. He ran a fingertip over the spot, where it faded into the rough weave of the fabric, and smiled.

Sam took the white cotton shirt and black tie from the mannequin, as well, and walked into the cramped, foul-smelling changing rooms.

It wasn't a perfect fit, but it was very good. Because they were unhemmed, the sleeves and the pants legs were long enough to fit his frame perfectly. The jacket wasn't cut quite broadly enough over the shoulders, but Sam still found he had adequate room to move without straining the seams because he had lost so much weight since the accident.

Brushing his hair back with a filthy hand and tucking it behind his ears, he almost cut a dashing figure: bone-white with sharp cheekbones uncovered and eyes dark under the inadequate fluorescents. His jeans and t-shirt lay in a stained, smelly pile in the corner below the dressing room bench, looking even more pathetic by comparison. Sam kicked at the lifeless heap with the battered work boots he still wore.

He looked up again and smiled, brushing a thumb over his reflection's cold metal cheek. Then he peeled the plastic bandage away from his face and affixed it to the mirror, the brown spot of dried blood in the center of the pad still visible. Sam brushed at the spot on his lapel once, with something approaching tenderness, then left the bandage, his clothes, and the dressing room behind.

The desk clerk said nothing when he emerged. He heard her breath catch, but any protest died on her lips when he turned his head in her direction and winked before walking out the door.

At sunset, Sam sat inside Lucifer with the engine off and tore the autographed poster into tiny pieces, one square at a time. It was an exercise of focus, though it wasn't focus that he needed but a way to mark time, to tick off the hours with physical tokens.

Near one o'clock, he drove to one of the pay-per-hour parking lots at the head of the Strip and headed southward from the Wynn resort, his jacket pockets full of tiny paper scraps. Dressed and groomed as he was, he drew stares from women and men-those who talked loudly and stumbled along the sidewalk and those who walked silent and wide-eyed and dazzled amid the lights.

He stopped on the middle of the elevated pedestrian bridge between the Barbary Coast and Bally's, staring out at the play of the Bellagio fountains. The handfuls of shredded poster he let fall along Flamingo Avenue fluttered like obscene desert snow and rained down on a waiting limousine whose female passengers, standing up and crowded through the limo's sunroof in their scant dresses, giggled and writhed underneath the unexpected shower.

They did not look up. Sam looked away.

Silent amid traffic and the screams of revelers, he walked Las Vegas Boulevard in a circuit-crossing the street at Mandalay Bay and returning north to Spring Mountain Road where he had parked the Dodge.

The hypervigilant parking police had shoved two tickets below his windshield wipers. Sam tore each in half and let them fall at his feet. He climbed into the car, a white shard in darkness, and waited for the sunrise to wash out the lights of the Strip.

It was the morning of the day 'Nightmare' was set to premiere.

With the morning only just underway, Sam fired up Lucifer's engine for its final drive. South Valley View would have been the quickest way down to Flamingo, but he made a left at West Twain so he could get to the semicircle of access roads in front of the Hotel Rio via Dean Martin Drive.

_Dean._

_Dean._

On Flamingo Road just before the intersection with Hotel Rio Drive, facing east toward the I-15 interchange, Sam pulled onto the broad right-hand shoulder and clicked his hazard lights on. Lucifer growled as it idled, bucking and shifting with anxious pistons. The car was not as patient as Sam was, but it was he who had his hand on the gear shift.

From his vantage point-looking across a bare cement expanse studded here and there with power line towers-Sam would see Crowley's car as it turned from Dean Martin onto Flamingo. He breathed as he waited, filling his lungs with the weak, dry air that trickled in from the vents and letting the brutal sun rise past his windshield and ride the sky to noon.

As he had hoped, the red Porsche swung in a hard left onto Hotel Rio and began accelerating through its sinuous curves, mocking the stop-and-go traffic on Flamingo Drive overhead. Sam took Lucifer out of neutral, the transmission knocking.

When Crowley neared the east-west split, gunning toward the yellow light, Sam ground the accelerator into the floorboards, throwing gravel from the shoulder onto the cars stopped at the eastbound red light.

The desert light spun a gold halo around his head as he let his foot off the gas and took his hands from the wheel.

Turning his head to see Crowley's wide eyes through the windshield just a second before they collided, Sam raised his hand, first and last fingers extended. And he smiled.

The Porsche's front end struck dead on between Lucifer's front and rear door on the passenger side and folded in on itself, a shockwave that jarred the windshield from its frame. It might have hit the ground intact if not for the fact that Crowley followed its trajectory up and out of the car, his flailing hands shattering it in midair.

Sam felt his collarbone snap at the same time that his temple impacted the window beside him, which spiderwebbed but did not break. The passenger window, however, blew inward as Crowley's head, studded with a crown of bright shards, broke against it.

The world went dark amid shrieking tires and horns, and Sam closed his eyes to receive at last his benediction in blood and glass.


	15. Epilogue

For a moment he thinks he is dreaming when he sees a man sitting at his bedside. But it is only the visual disruption of the film of blood over his left eye that fuzzes the figure out. His vision is weak; his mind, sharp and terrible.

"Dean," Sam tries to say.

It isn't Dean. Of course it isn't, even though he knows the voice.

"I read about you in the newspaper," Castiel says. "To be more precise, I read about Crowley. Your name was not mentioned."

At this Sam smiles, though it hurts his bruised cheekbone. His voice, when it comes, is a croak. "Hello, Cas."

"Hello, Sam."

"Crowley is dead," Sam says.

"Yes," says Cas. "The newspapers say he died instantly. It seems you and I are the only ones left."

"For now."

Cas tilts his head, that infuriating tic of puzzlement.

"Mirror," Sam says. "Find me a mirror."

"Is that a good idea?" Cas asks.

"You know the answer."

His trench coat rustles as Cas gets up. He is gone only a few moments and returns with a makeup compact. The shade of the powder is a dark mahogany.

Sam must reach for it with his right hand. His left arm is immobilized, cast-bound from the lip of the stiff cervical collar around his neck down to his palm. He holds the mirror at arm's length.

The iris of his left eye swims in a sea of burst capillaries. A track of stitches curves down from the crown of his head, which has been partially shaved, and bisects his eyebrow. The right side of his face is not bruised or badly lacerated, but the stars of glass have become comets, streaking back toward his hairline and down his cheek, a falling universe.

Sam takes a deep breath and lets the hand holding the mirror drift down to his lap as he closes his eyes. "Perfect."

_Beautiful,_ Dean says softly, inside his head.

Cas is quiet for a moment, presumably studying Sam's face, its cherubic half-smile. Then he says, "What can I do for you, Sam? What do you need?"

Sam opens his eyes, lets his vision resolve again. "I need you to get me out of here," he says. "And I need a notebook and a pencil. Then-"

"Then?" Cas asks.

In spite of the pain, Sam allows the smile its full play across his battered face. "Then I need a car."


End file.
